“Major League Baseball controls all the revenue streams from broadcasting and merchandising outside the United States and Canada. That means the Mariners, despite being home to one of Japan’s most popular players, must split the revenue from the Japanese market equally with the rest of the league’s 30 teams.”

Meche has been a decent signing and all the other signings listed on this list were viewed in a vacuum except for one…

It’s not secret that FanGraphs doesn’t think Dayton Moore is smart. I’m a Royals fan and I have more than enough doubts myself.

It just reeks a bit of childish piling on when little snide marks like this are made.

Critism of Dayton Moore moves should be reserved for when he does make questionable moves. And there will be plenty more opporutnity for that.

It doesn’t need to be mentioned in an article about a poor free agent pitching class when Dayton Moore actually out performed his peers.

I’m not seeing anywhere where he said that the incentives would be based on performing metrics. Are you reading something into it that isn’t there?

As for the highly incentive based contracts, most players don’t like them because there’s less guaranteed money. The players most likely to accept such deals are players that have had recent injury problems, such as Glaus, Sheets, Harden. You wouldn’t be able to attract most free agents with that kind of approach.

[1] Does Dave Duncan get a % of the money he helps guys get in FA? (Suppan and Weaver).

[2] Did OAK know that Zito and Mulder were hurt or on their way down?

The cardinals traded Haren for Mulder, which in hindsight looks horrific. At the time StL had all 5 starters throw 200 IP. Still Haren’s minor league ‘control’ and ‘hard to hit’ numbers were there, with just a cup of coffee in MLB. Mulder was supposed to be the new version of John Tudor and turned out to be damaged goods, like the time StL signed Danny Jackson.

I also see Woody Williams who the cards let walk after ’04. Williams had a decent season with SDP in 06 (12-5 3.68), but saw his IP and K’s fall significantly in his SDP years. HOU was likely putting too much stock in the Woody they saw with the Cardinals up to the 04 season, and ignored the drop-off in 05 and 06.

When are teams going to ralize that when you sign a “Dave Duncan project”, he’s not going to perform as well for you as he did for him? Maybe they have, Pineiro is still unsigned.

Given the impressive list of big-dollar signings you’ve listed, and the complete failure of many of them, it could well be true. But without (a) adding in the good contracts signed that winter as well and (b) maybe giving the numbers for other free-agent pitcher-signing winters we just don’t know. It’s just gawking at bad contracts… if you took the worst contracts of every season and added them up you’d probably get a number similar to $53 mil/win.

Aaron Miles, Yuni Betancourt, and Ronny Cedeno combined for a wOBA of .225 last year (made-up number). I wouldn’t include that fact in an article about how 2009 was a terrible year for middle infielders, I’d look up the numbers of all 2009 MI.

But for the mid and small market teams, isn’t it theoretically possible to give so much in incentives that you actually might attract “slightly” better talent? And if your guaranteed salaries come in under $30M, with the potential to wind up three times that amount–of course, that would likely result in contention.

Basically, I’m wondering why smaller budget teams haven’t been more creative in finding ways to pay-per-win.