Mariners And The Ghost Of Free Agents Past

So after a discussion on twitter the other night, which started out with Colin O’Keefe of Proball NW asking a legtimate question on Twitter: “What was the last free-agent signing that worked out?”, I started doing some digging on Baseball-Reference. This was supposed to be one of those interesting exercises that makes you go “Oh, I remember that” or “Good times”… let me tell you I uttered none of those things doing this process.

This was an extremely depressing endevor and I’ll just give a little warning here: this isn’t for the faint of heart. I knew there was certainly going to be some bad memories but I thought that it of course would be mixed in with some good ones. Not so.

I tried to include free-agents of some type of notirity. I left off guys such as Arthur Rhodes and Mark McLemore as they weren’t paid much and weren’t hearld much in terms of fan base excitement.

2011:

Miguel Olivo – fWAR 0.9  vs $spent $2.5 mil (so far)

2010:

Chone Figgins – fWAR -0.1 vs $spent $17 mil (so far)

2009:

Russell Branyan* – fWAR 2.7  vs $spent $1.4 mil
2008:

Carlos Silva– fWAR 1.3  vs $spent $20.5 mil
2007:

Miguel Batista– fWAR 1.2 vs $spent $15.5 mil

Jeff Weaver– fWAR 1.0  vs $spent $8.3 mil

2006:

Jarrod Washburn – fWAR 7.7  vs $spent $37 mil

2005:

Adrian Beltre – fWAR 16.6  vs $spent $ 64 mil

Richie Sexson – fWAR 5.1  vs $spent $ 50 mil
2004:

Raul Ibanez– fWAR 12.7  vs $spent $ 19.6 mil

Eddie Guardado – fWAR 0.3  vs $spent $ 16.25 mil

Scott Spiezio – fWAR -0.8  vs $spent $ 5.6 mil

2003:

N/A

2002:

Ruben Sierra – fWAR 0.7  vs $spent $ 1.9 mil

James Baldwin – fWAR 0.4  vs $spent $ 1.2 mil
2001:

Brett Boone – fWAR 20.1  vs $spent $ 36.2 mil

2000:

Aaron Sele – fWAR 7.6  vs $spent $ 14.5 mil

John Olerud – fWAR 16.1  vs $spent $ 35.5 mil

Obviously, Boone, Olerud and Beltre all stand out as the “good” (as well as few) free-agent investments