Extra Credit: The Machine

With Albert Pujols currently tearing up the Brewers, I thought it only fitting to post one of the best commercials ESPN has put out.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As a sports fan, we all know that it’s going to be a rollercoaster ride of emotions throughout the years as we root for superstars, underachievers, and overachievers that suit up and wear the same colors that most of us are willing to proudly display somewhere in our everyday life. But whenever you boil everything down, it usually falls into one of three categories. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Watching the NBA draft lottery in 2008 as my beloved Chicago Bulls lucked into getting the 1^st overall pick and thus being able to select hometown boy Derrick Rose is a great memory. Finding out about Darryl Kile’s death back in 2002 was one of the worst moments I’ve been through as a sports fan, and it doesn’t get much uglier then Rex Grossman being your quarterback when your team reaches the Super Bowl for the first time in your lifetime. But yesterday was one of the most unique days I’ve ever had as a sports fan, and this is why.

First things first, the good. The Cardinals were down 1-0 to the hated Brewers but Albert Pujols showed why he’s the best player in baseball and why if anyone isdeserving of a $300 million dollar contract, it’s him. He finished the night with 3 doubles and a home run to bag 3 runs and 5 RBIs as the Cardinals won in Milwaukee to even the series up 1-1 as it heads to St. Louis tomorrow tonight.

The bad was that I stayed up to watch my Bears get gashed by Calvin Johnson early and Jahvid Best late as the offensive line was busy either committing 9 false starts or giving Jay Cutler no time to throw. Cutler and Forte looked great and if the Bears had not committed so many costly penalties and been able to keep from giving up the big play (like the Cover 2 is designed to do) they probably would have won the game. Instead they fall 3 games behind the Packers and Lions and are left with huge questions about what they need to do going forward.

And the ugly was the inevitable but painful news that the first two weeks of the NBA season had been lost. I’m going to be writing more about this obviously because I’m such a huge basketball fan but I couldn’t help but feel the sting whenever the news became official. More is going to get canceled, possibly the entire season, but the lockout is finally really sinking in. I was only 10 when the NBA lost games before so this is the first time I’ve really experienced lost games (I’m not an NHL fan) and let me tell you, it’s ugly.

As a sports fan, you expect a lot of ups-and-downs throughout not just the years but from game-to-game and quarter-to-quarter, or inning if we’re talking baseball. But yesterday I was taken on quite possibly the biggest rollercoaster of my sports life, getting jam-packed with all three emotional trips from my three favorite and most closely-followed teams all in the span of a few hours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take some Ambien and get some rest, I don’t think I can handle another night like that for a while.

Pujols Should Be The First $300 Million Man

All off-season, with apologies to Cliff Lee, the biggest story in baseball was the contract negotiations between Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals. Baseball fans all across the country made up their minds rather quickly on whether or not they thought Pujols or any other athlete was really worth such a large amount of money. But with all of the talk about the numbers, one of the things rarely talked about in baseball circles was the numbers that we all had at our disposal and how that should effect the Cardinals upcoming decision on the greatest baseball player of our generation.

The Cardinals were bought by Bill DeWitt Jr. in 1995 for the nice, even, amount of $150 million dollars. A big investment of course, but one that has certainly proven to be a wise one. Forbes ranked the Cardinals at the end of last year as being worth $518 million dollars. That is a 245% increase over the last 17 years and means the team is worth $368 million more today than it was when DeWitt purchased them, or am increase of $21.6 million a year. Struggling to make ends meet is not something I think the Cardinals ownership is going to have to worry about for the foreseeable future and while that should be an assumption, it's also important to note just how much money this team is worth today compared to when the team was sold in 1995.

Team worth is only half of the picture though when it comes to crunching the numbers for the owners over the past 16 years. Forbes has done a wonderful job of compiling enough information for every team that they are able to tell us what the operating income (or profit) is for each team on a year-to-year basis. I looked back to the end of 1996, the end of the first year of ownership, to see just how the Cardinals have performed financially each year. Surprisingly enough, there have been a total of 5 years where the Cardinals lost money, including a staggering $11.1 million in 2004. But since 2006, things have turned around dramatically with the team posting earnings of $14.0, $21.5, $6.6, $12.8 and $19.8 the last 5 years. Since 1996 the team has made a total of $71 million dollars, an average of $4.4 million a year and an average of $14.9 million the past 5 years.

Right now, the Cardinals are paying Pujols 16 million dollars a year. Assuming the Cardinals make the same amount of money as they did on average the past 5 years, they would be right at breaking even for the year. The goal for any business is evident; to make money. Owners of a sports team though, and especially a team with fans like the Cardinals, are expected to compete. The DeWitt family has shown that they are willing to spend money to do that in the past so this certainly isn't a Florida Marlins situation. What could the Cardinals do to try and mitigate the blow of a 30 million dollar contract?

Lance Berkman is under contract this season for 8 million dollars and Kyle Lohse for 12 over the next two years. Adam Wainwright is scheduled to make 9 and 12 million in team options over the next two years but with his injury this year, you might be able to convince him to take a small pay cut. He's making almost 7 million this year so if you could get him for that over the next couple years you would have to consider that a success. Those are the most obvious options for saving money when it comes to the team and if you replaced Berkman and Lohse with guys that made 5 million a piece, that would still be a 10 million dollar difference once those two are off the books.

Also, in the years from 2006 to 2009 the Cardinals have averaged 43,767 fans per home game, or 3.5 million fans each year. The Cardinals fans love Pujols unconditionally and would hate to see him go, and I think it would be more than fair if the Cardinals added just one dollar to each ticket as a “Pujols tax” to help with the burden of such a large contract. If you did that, the contract would run the team 26.5 million a year and while that is still a massive amount, it certainly looks a lot more manageable then 30 million. And if you were going to pay any baseball player, wouldn't it be Pujols?

In his first 10 seasons he has never had less then 30 home runs or 100 runs batted in. He ranks in the top 15 all time in both OPS and adjusted-OPS and is most likely going to finish among the top 10 position players in the history of the sport. I could go on and on about his accomplishments but everyone that enjoys the game of baseball has heard time and again how he stacks up against the greatest players to ever play the game. What Pujols has achieved to start his career is unprecedented and if he can keep to the level of play he is accustomed to over the next 5 years he will be off to the best start ever for a baseball player. He would have 2850 hits, 1780 runs, 640 doubles, 612 home runs, and 1845 RBIs after 15 years. That would put him 42nd in hits, 18th in runs, 9th in doubles, 7th in home runs, and 11th in RBI's all-time, placing him ahead of many of the greatest hitters to ever swing a bat.

Even so, how are the Cardinals going to be able to pay such a high salary and still be competitive? Well for comparisons sake, the average salary of the top ten highest paid players in 2001 was 14.25 million and for this season it has ballooned up to 21.69 million, an increase of 7.44 million. Even if you only increase the number by 5 million which is below the average, that number would still be an average of 26.75 a year for a top ten salary guy. That number is very close to what the salary would be costing the Cardinals if they implemented the “Pujols tax” I mentioned earlier.

Finally, Alex Rodriguez is the player most closely associated with Albert Pujols. Both players have been huge successes since their careers began and Pujols is looking to take the title of highest paid baseball player that A-Rod has held onto since he signed that massive contract with the Texas Rangers. So in Rodriguez's first ten seasons, how much did he earn? From 1996-2005 he made $120 million dollars compared to $96 million for Pujols. Now remember that the $120 million is starting from 5 years earlier so it would translate to an even bigger difference. Pujols has been underpaid for his entire career. Combine that with all of the other data from above and honestly, I don't understand why the Cardinals wouldn't want to keep the best player in baseball, in their uniform for his entire career, no matter the cost.