Making Sense Of The Ryan Howard Blockbuster Deal Through Internet Ramblings

I'm going to be honest, when I heard Ryan Howard got a five-year, $125 million extension from the Phillies, making him the highest-paid player in the history of the franchise, I smiled. As a fan. So please read the rest of this post with that in mind. After being genuinely happy for Philadelphia's biggest sports star – a moniker I mean both literally, regarding his size, and metaphorically, regarding his level of celebrity now that Donovan McNabb is gone – I immediately took to the internet to see what smarter baseball minds thought about the deal.

The verdict: they don't have a freaking clue either.

Will Carroll used PECOTA to "prove" that, per advance statistical projections, "they just paid A-Rod $ to Fred McGriff." Sure, baseball-reference.com lists the Crime Dog as one of the comparable players to Howard through age 29, but they also have Richie Sexson on the top of that list and Willie McCovey fourth. There's also the likes of Tony Clark on the list, as well as names like Mark McGwire. The point is, even the statistics don't know the type of player Howard will end up becoming.

Again, comparing Howard's production to someone like McGriff doesn’t seem fair, as Howard has more than 49 home runs and 144 RBI in every full season in the bigs while McGriff didn't have more than 36 homers or 107 RBI in any season in his 19-year career. And for those of you who will scream to high heaven that home runs and RBI no longer a good slugger make, Howard's OPS over the first five full seasons averages out higher than McGriff's, while, yes, his OPS+ is quite similar. Oh, and while McGriff did go to two World Series, winning one in his career, he only went to the playoffs once in his first five seasons and hit a paltry 3-21 in five games that year. Howard had that many home runs in the 2008 World Series.

Wait, how did I get caught in this trap comparing those two? Damn you, Will Carroll. The point is, this deal is not how the Phillies slugger compares to players of a different era to this point in his career. The point is to try and project what he'll do from this point forward.

Now, many people in Philly think this is a "thank you" contract from the Phillies. Thank you for leading the team to the playoffs all these years when you were making $400,000 and had to struggle through arbitration negotiations and one-year deals. Thank you for getting a late start to your career because we signed Jim Thome to fill our new stadium and took too long to unload him and start your clock. Thank you, here's a boatload of cash. And the boat is lined with gold.

Be that as it may, that's probably not the best way to do things either, from a business standpoint, is it? As MLB Trade Rumors puts it:

With so many (future) holes to fill, it is hard to believe that Philadelphia decided to put so much of its 2012 payroll into Ryan Howard. This analysis doesn't even get into the problems for the team when Howard pulls down a cool $25MM annually from 2014-2016 for his age 34-36 seasons.

For a team that has managed to position itself as the clear favorite in the 2010 National League, such success may be fleeting.

Enrico from The 700 Level seems to take a similar angle to most in Philly:

In my opinion, it's a pretty fair deal for all parties involved over the next three or four seasons. One of the biggest sluggers in the game is locked up on your squad and is getting paid accordingly. The key to whether this deal will prove sage or a bit overzealous will all depend on how well Howard holds up into his mid-to-late thirties. Some are already saying the Phillies will regret the deal because Howard will decline rapidly. That, clearly, remains to be seen.

And those "already saying the Phillies will regret the deal" are people like Craig Calcaterra at NBC, who wrote, "this is madness."

But he's also – at best – the third most valuable player on the Phillies, and reasonable arguments can be made that he's not even that high. He's big and he's slow and despite that extra work he's put in, it's more likely than not that he's going to age poorly.

That seems to be the crux of the issue. Statheads will throw all the numbers they can in front of you to indicate that Howard isn't as valuable as Chase Utley or, presumably to Calcaterra, Jayson Werth. But the sense at every Phillies game I've ever been to or watched on TV has always been, "okay Chase, get on base so Ryan can knock you in." You know what, maybe that's a stupid way to determine a player's importance, but there's no statistical way to measure that kind of value to a team.

The one guy who knows as much about the Phillies as anyone is Bill Baer from Crashburn Alley. At first, he looked at the deal and hated it because the numbers indicate that Howard's WARP3 – wins above replacement – will be below the value of what the team will be paying him at the end of his contract. That said, Baer does admit that signing Howard now – before Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder get their money – may save the Phillies some in the long run:

[T]he Phillies may end up saving themselves several million dollars every year theoretically as the post-2011 free agent market may include Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder and both may exceed Howard’s average annual value of $25 million per season. Both players are likely to be signed to extensions (in Fielder’s case, perhaps with a new team) beforehand.

Most Phillies fans will love the extension, as it keeps a fan favorite in town for a long time. Stat-savvy fans immediately dislike the deal. Most Phillies fans will come to loathe the deal in several years when the Phillies are hamstrung by Howard’s relatively large salary and declining production.

Baer updated his post to include information from Matt Swartz of Baseball Prospectus who thinks this deal is somewhere right down the middle, especially if you factor in the potential for inflation:

The contract is far from spectacular, but it is unlikely to be an albatross. The deal will ultimately come down to two primary factors, neither of which can be properly estimated by either group of commentators: the rate at which Howard ages, and the rate at which the price of a win inflates. Obviously, if Howard ages gracefully and produces well into his thirties, the Phillies are probably going to be getting a great bargain. Equally obviously, if he tanks, the Phillies are in trouble. If major-league salaries inflate the way that they did during the middle of the 2000s, Howard is going to have plenty of leeway to age without being useless; if salaries hold steady like they have over the last few years, Howard is not only going to need to maintain his production, but might need to learn to pitch, too, in order to be worth his salary.

In other words, we don't know what the market will bear in four or five years. The Phillies had a payroll of just over $27 million dollars in 1999 and this season it's upwards of $140 million. Will that change by 2016? It likely won't become $210 million by then, but traversing the $150 million barrier seems completely logical.

Jayson Stark, who knows more about Phillies history than anyone I know, wrote this about the deal:

Once Howard got his chance, he decided to turn himself into his generation's Babe Ruth at the plate. This man sent so many baseballs rocketing over so many fences that the Phillies ultimately concluded they had no choice but to hand him this deal.

So is Howard like Fred McGriff, or one of the greatest sluggers in the history of the sport? Time will tell. Some may say that what Stark wrote is outlandish, but is it anywhere near as outlandish as this comment by Jonah Keri?

5 years, $125 million for Ryan Howard!!! A financial quagmire that'll make the Iraq War look like a slap fight.

That's just a stupid thing to write, and I'm sure Keri, who I love on most days when he's not writing about the Phillies, would admit that. I only add that to illustrate how wildly disparate the opinions are on this contract.

There are too many opinions to list. Please read what Tom Verducci wrote at SI, but also check out what Dash wrote over at the Fightins and try to take both opinions with the same exact merit. Of course, you also have to read Jim Salisbury – the guy who broke this story yesterday afternoon – for his take.

After digesting all this (uh-oh, there's a food metaphor coming), I look at the deal like this. The Phillies gave Howard what they felt he deserved. It's money they set aside for him. It's not Chase Utley's money or Jayson Werth's money or Jimmy Rollins' money or Domonic Brown's money or even Cliff Lee's money. Howard is like the dessert sundae to the Phillies meal. It doesn't matter how much you eat, there's a separate space in your stomach for that sundae. The Phillies just guaranteed themselves a lot of sundaes, even if it means early-onset diabetes in five or six years. You know what, we should be okay with that, because until then, sundaes taste delicious. Oh, and so does going to the World Series.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.