When Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak arrived in Dallas a few days ago for baseball's annual winter meetings, it didn't take long for him to discover that hot stove league activity regarding three-time MVP slugger Albert Pujols had risen from a rather slow simmer to a rapid boil.
By Tuesday, the pursuit of baseball's most coveted free agent was positively scalding. Within hours, Pujols' agent Dan Lozano was holding two rather significant contract offers in his hand — a 10-year, $200-million deal from the rather serious Miami Marlins, and a similar offer from a "mystery" team. There's also still an undisclosed offer from the Chicago Cubs. So after months of sitting idly by, the Cardinals were finally forced to react to the suddenly aggressive marketplace with their own new counter offer late Tuesday afternoon that everyone in Cardinal Nation ought to hope isn't too little too late.
"I suspect (a response) is going to come quickly," Mozeliak told the Post-Dispatch's Derrick Goold on Tuesday afternoon. "That would have to come from that camp. ... In this situation we're participants. I don't think we're dictating anything."
Funny how that worked out, isn't it?
The Cardinals have had more than two years to dictate everything, to not only aggressively set the marketplace for their slugger, but to essentially eliminate any future competition because they could have put together a knockout deal at any point over the course of the last 24 months. Instead, in typical organizational fashion, they chose not to do that. The Cardinal Way at the negotiating table is to play an emotionless, but potentially dangerous game where you do nothing until you have to do something.
That tends to work just fine with utility infielders, fifth starters and bottom-of-the-order guys. But with once-in-a-generation Future Hall of Fame stars, it can be incredibly risky business.
We should know within the next 24 to 48 hours if the Cardinals' negotiating gambit was pure, nervy genius or a regrettably arrogant miscalculation, because it's likely that Lozano won't leave Dallas without a signed deal in hand.
I sure hope that deal is with the Cardinals, because it means Mozeliak and club chairman Bill DeWitt, Jr. won't have to explain what went wrong in allowing the best player in baseball and a franchise treasure to get away with nothing more to show for it than a few extra compensatory draft picks.
And now with the recent knee surgery of outfielder Allen Craig, who likely won't be available to play until May, the ripple effects of his recovery extend to the Pujols negotiations. Plan B for the Cardinals if they couldn't re-sign Pujols was to move Lance Berkman from right field to first base and then install Craig as the regular right fielder. Clearly, this changes things.
The Cardinals have behaved as if the idea of anteing up a 10-year contract to Pujols in excess of $230 million is the crime of the century, when of course it isn't. What they have been able to underpay for him for the last 11 seasons is. They have gotten Pujols' services at bargain rates since the day he showed up on the major league roster in 2001 making by baseball terms a paltry $200,000. Over the first three seasons in the majors, Pujols earned a total of $1.6 million while producing on the average 38 home runs, 127 RBIs and a .334 batting average.
Over the course of his last eight seasons in the majors when he earned three MVP titles, led the Cardinals to two World Series titles, three NL pennants and established himself as the best player in the game, Pujols earned an average of $13.9 million, which wouldn't put him in baseball's Top 10 in earnings. Yet, during those same eight seasons, he produced on the average 41 homers, 118 RBIs and a .326 batting average.
Through 11 seasons of Pujols' MLB career, the Cards paid him an average salary of $10.25 million.
In the high-priced world of major league baseball, no one can say with a straight face that Pujols was ever paid anything near his true value. And this is what frustrates me so much about how pro sports works. Everyone moans when a player doesn't live up to his big contract. But where are those whining voices of public dissent when a player exceeds his contract and seeks to balance things out at the negotiating table?
So whatever the Cardinals might end up paying Pujols over the course of the next eight to 10 years, it will still be a bargain when you calculate how much he was worth over his full career. Let's not forget that an aging Pujols is worth more to St. Louis than to any other franchise or city, because there is history between the player, the franchise and the city. Seeing a 41- or 42-year-old Pujols as a Cardinal closing in on the major league all-time home run record would matter so much more in St. Louis than in Miami.
For all he has done during 11 seasons with the Cardinals, Pujols already has more than earned whatever he gets over the next decade if he remains in St. Louis. I can't fathom how this story can end any other way than with Pujols wearing the birds on the bat across his chest.
