Yankees Make Posada Highest Paid Weasel in World History
According to news reports, the Yankees re-signed 36 year-old catcher Jorge Posada Monday night to a 4 year, 52 million dollar deal, making him the highest paid catcher in all of baseball. Now, I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by this given the Yankees’ bottomless pit of money and love for players pushing 40, but the wisdom of the move seems dubious for a couple of reasons.
First of all, Posada is 36. And he’s a catcher. It is a known fact that catchers decline earlier than essentially every other type of player, so re-signing him for 4 years is risky to say the least. As an illustration of this point, Johnny Bench (widely regarded as the best catcher of all time) retired when he was 35. In fact, of all catchers in the Hall of Fame, only one had multiple above average offensive seasons (>100 OPS+) past the age of 36 in which they played more than 100 games. Any guesses as to who this is? The answer is none other than Carlton Fisk, who had 3. Those in favor of the deal will probably note that Posada is coming off the best season of his career, which leads me to my second point.
Great as Posada was this past season, it was largely due to luck. Before I get pummeled by a crowd of angry Yankee fans, let me marshal some evidence. In the past three seasons, here are Posada’s hitting lines, along with his BABIP:
2005: .262/.352/.430 .291 BABIP
2006: .277/.374/.492 .307 BABIP
2007: .339/.427/.545 .390 BABIP
What should stand out to you is Posada’s ridiculously high and impossibe-to-sustain BABIP in 2007. For reference, the average BABIP in the major leagues is usually around .300. For those of you who think Posada is just hitting the ball harder now, here are Posada’s line drive percentages and isolated power (SLG-AVG) rates the past two seasons:
2006: 20%, .215
2007: 23%, .206
In other words, Posada was demonstrably not hitting the ball any harder this year than last year. His line drive percentage was up a little, but not nearly enough to explain the huge increase in productivity. Furthermore, his power output was in fact down slightly from the previous year. Put simply, a lot of singles and doubles fell in for Posada that in a normal year would be caught.
In sum, let me just state my point bluntly: Posada is an aging catcher who happened to get lucky at the right time, which allowed him to score a big paycheck. There is no way in hell for Posada to keep up this level of production, and in all likelihood he will perform significantly worse next year, which will then be followed by a rather sharp decline if history is any judge.
Can the Yankees afford to make a mistake of this magnitude? Sure, they’ve got the money to pay for it. But if you’re a Yankees fan out there expecting Posada to mash his way to Cooperstown over the next four years, then you’re in for a rude awakening.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
[…] OPS+. But before you think that’s a sign of things to come, consider this: his BABIP was a Posadaesque .391 last season. His GB% was also abnormally high, 47%, so together that equals an überlucky […]