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