Overpaid Players

The halfway point beckons for the 2010 Major League Baseball season. As good a time as any to check on which players are stealing the most money from their respective clubs … well, OK, stealing is an exaggeration, but every season brings more than its share of players raking in eight figures in return that could be duplicated by minimum salaried rookies.

The biggest reason for bad contracts: The pressure to win compels general managers who want to hold onto their jobs to extend that extra year or two (or three) to a productive player who’s up for a contract, even if common sense says the player’s best years will end before the deal does (a la Todd Helton of the Rockies and Aaron Rowand of the Giants). Or a GM will take a leap of faith on a player who’s had a brief run of success, hoping it wasn’t a fluke. Too often it is (as with Jeff Suppan(notes), just traded to the Cardinals from the Brewers, and Gary Matthews Jr., recently released by the Mets).

In going around the horn to track the most overpriced player at each position, we matched each player’s 2010 salary against a statistic of growing influence in baseball circles – Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). Put out by “Baseball Prospectus,” VORP compiles a score for each player based on his run production (or run prevention by pitchers) over and above what a team could expect from a low-cost, minimal salaried player at his position.

Low-cost “replacement” players are found to perform at about 80 percent of the league average, the numbers show, classifying them as slightly below-average players. So a higher-priced veteran needs to perform well above that level to justify his salary. To see who is and who isn’t, we compiled salary figures and VORP scores across the majors. We found that, on average, a player is paid just over $877,000 for each VORP point he accumulates. Example: A player who makes $5 million annually should have a VORP score of 5.7 ($5,000,000 / $877,000). If his VORP score is lower than 5.7, he’s overpaid.

So who besides Matthews, Helton, Rowand and Suppan lead the overpaid team? Detroit’s Gerald Laird ($4 million; -11.3 VORP) is the catcher, while Houston’s Carlos Lee ($19 million; -7.4 VORP) completes the outfield. Pat Burrell, recently picked up by the San Francisco Giants, still qualifies as this year’s least productive designated hitter for his .221 early season average in Tampa Bay.