Top 2016 Baseball Contracts by Hitter

One of the comments made by some “talking heads” referred to Matt Kemp as near worthless and was a BAD contract, so I decided to see how bad it really was.

I looked up the 2016 Salaries for the top 15 hitters in Baseball. I then looked up on MLB.com this years stats for each of those players. (as of Saturday August 6th) There can be many metrics to compare stats. You may have a favorite. I used a simple one: Runs Batted In

Runs win games. A player who drives in a lot of runs should be important. Possibly getting the highest salary. A player who gets on base and scores runs is valuable too, but until a batter knocks him in, a team can not win.

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The last column of the chart below is RBI/AB. This balances out the number of RBIs by the At Bats. This is the metric I am using to compare. The first column is rank in Salary for 2016 (batters only). So Albert Pujols has the 5th highest at 25 Million a  year and is producing the best RBI per at bat. And Jacoby Ellsbury is the worst of the lot. Missing from the list is the #1 Salary at 28 Million. Josh Hamilton is injured and out for the year (ouch).

Albert Pujols 0.2043 RBI’s per at bat ranks 5th in the Majors this year. The leader at 0.2338 is a 40 yr old David Ortiz, making 16 million this year.

The chart is listed below. Look at the 4th name. Now we get to the reason why I did this exercise. Yup Matt Kemp. Even though he ranks 13th in player 2016 Salary, in my metric he ranks 4th in production among these15 big salary guys.

Look at some other names below it. You don’t hear smear words from management about players like Adrian Gonzalez or Joe Mauer.

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Look down the list even further and we find “the bum” Justin Upton. Tenth highest contract having a miserable year. Detroit has 5 more years to look forward to. Now that is a BAD contract. There are several more on the list that we all can agree are quite ugly and their Management could be loudly complaining about.

Have a look and see for yourself.