How To End a Career
If this really is the end of Albert Pujols’ career, then it’s hard to imagine a more depressing way for him to go out. Not just the very end—being unceremoniously DFA’ed in early May by a team in last place—but the whole Angels arc of his career. He’s been so bad for so long that even pieces lamenting his badness feel old at this point. But it is truly remarkable to look at the contrast between Albert Pujols’ years with the Cardinals and his years with the Angels.
In the first 11 years of his career, he was a legend, finishing in the Top Five in MVP voting ten times. Then he went to Los Angeles and almost instantly became mediocre. He only received MVP votes in two of his ten years with the team, never placing higher than 17th. But more than that, he became an utterly one-dimensional player. In St. Louis he did everything. He hit for a high average, walked 90-100 times per season, hit doubles, and was even a deceptively good baserunner, scoring over 100 runs a season. He also turned himself into an elite defensive player—in 2007, he finished fifth in the NL in defensive WAR as a first baseman.
But with the Angels, he did none of that. He basically just stood back and swung for the fences. He stopped getting on base and hitting line drives. His value in the field and on the basepaths evaporated. For a few years he hit enough home runs to stay an above-average offensive player, but even that eventually dissipated.
And the cloud hanging over all of this was his contract: a ten-year, $240 million deal that was the third-largest in baseball history when he signed it. At the time it didn’t seem that unreasonable—Albert Pujols was a historically great player, so why not give him a historically large contract? But he has basically never been “worth it” in crude measures of dollars per wins above replacement.
Of course, every athlete gets older, and it’s always sad to watch their skills diminish. But in baseball that sadness is compounded by the way contracts are structured. Peyton Manning was dreadful in his last season, but because of the NFL’s salary structure, the Broncos were able to put a good team around him and he actually won a Super Bowl. Similarly, in the NBA, Shaquille O’Neal transitioned from an All-Star to a complementary player in his later years (not always gracefully, but he tried) because NBA contracts are shorter, giving teams more flexibility.*
*It’s worth pointing out that neither of these superstars were underpaid, either. Manning and O’Neal each earned ~$250 million in their playing careers, despite the salary caps in the NFL and NBA.
Historically, baseball was different. With a long period of team control and no limits on compensation or contract length, players were typically underpaid early in their career and overpaid late. Occasionally this would lead to some awkwardness, like the Twins trotting Joe Mauer out to first base for five years of an eight-year contract he signed to catch, or the Yankees pressuring Alex Rodriguez to retire midseason so they could clear room on the roster for Aaron Judge. Teams just hoped to get enough value in the early years of those deals so they could live with the awkward final seasons.
In retrospect, though, the Pujols contract looks like a real watershed moment, since it was one of the first times a contract went bad almost immediately. (The only other one I can think of was Barry Zito’s deal with San Francisco, but the Giants won two World Series with Zito, so it was hard to get too mad.) Even though the old system is technically still around, everyone seems to realize it no longer makes sense. The idea of trying to build a team through free agency, like the Angels did circa 2012, when they not only signed Pujols, but also Josh Hamilton and CJ Wilson, seems antiquated. Teams now prefer young, controllable talent. And while they continue to sign big contracts to guys for their 30s, they now pass those contracts along like a game of hot potato, desperately hoping not to be the one stuck with it when the age curve starts bending the wrong way.
While the focus tends to be on how bad this contract worked out for the Angels, it’s worth pointing out that it’s also bad for the players. There’s got to be a better way for a legend like Pujols to end his career. Under another salary system, Pujols would be an elite player for a dozen years, who then spent a few years as an above-average slugger before retiring at 37. But because he didn’t hit free agency for the first 11 years of his career, he didn’t get paid like a star until he was 32, when he no longer was one. Instead of spending his twilight years as a useful complementary piece on a team that could use a power-hitting righty, he played in front of Angels fans hoping for him to play like it was 2009 again. This wasn’t a good outcome for anybody.
As of now, the only solution anyone can come up with is GMs (of both the real and armchair variety) who insist they will NEVER sign a player into his late 30s, or for more than five years. But you can’t do that and leave the first part of baseball’s salary system—where players spend their entire prime under team control—unchanged without essentially stealing money from players…
Anyway, the CBA negotiations this year should go great!