Triple Digit Cheese: Milton Bradley and the Cubbies

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Milton Bradley and the Cubbies - Oh boy, what a bargain!!!

Milton Bradley and the Cubs finally came to an agreement for Milty's first multiyear gig in his 9 years with 7 different teams playing in the big show. Mike Bauman, a national columnist for MLB.com commented in one of his articles the Cubs could use a switch-hitting outfielder. Did he say, "outfielder"?? Did anyone bother to notice that he didn't play in the outfield for even two dozen full games last year? Anyway, let's forget about that for now and get back to; thirty meeeeeel-yon dollars!! Yikes!

Bradley has a lifetime average of 318 AB’s (2867/9) per year, with a standard deviation of 155. Considering he was hired by the Cubs for his offensive abilities, I’m going to ignore defensive contribution. With so few games played last year, that's pretty easy to do! So, $10M/per year, divided by 318 AB’s equals $31,391 per at-bat. Couple that with his lifetime hitting average of .280, that equals $112,113 for each hit! I chose to ignore OPS for this exercise, as well as, the fact he’s 30 and all performance stats will begin to decline. Then let’s realize that it will cost the Cubs around $873,786 for each home run, when you add up his 9 years, 103 total home runs, thus averaging 11.44 home runs per year (standard deviation = 6.95).

Now compare him to Mark Teixeira @ $22,500,000 per year with 6 seasons under his belt and averaging 569 AB's per year. So, we have $39,543 per at-bat; $136,355 per hit (.290 lifetime); $665,025 per home run (that's $208,761 less per home run than Milty).

Ok, I’m done! Thanks for reading – these numbers makes me sick to my stomach! I’ll stop before I get tempted to show that A-Rod, when facing Johan Santana in a New York City subway series game costs the two owners, albeit collectively, pretty close to $100K per at-bat, irrespective of their performance! Yikes again!

So, I leave you with one question; how long will Lou-P put up with Milty's crap? I'll go on the record and say they'll play nice until the early part of May!

ChopperJim