It is easy to criticize a bad contract after it's gone bad. And I would guess there are few, if any people, who think that Vernon Well's 7-year, $126M contract signed in December 2006 and covering 2008-2014 has been anything but bad. It probably suffices to say that, as of this writing, in 2009 Vernon Wells is the 2nd least valuable player in all of baseball, being 1.4 Wins Below Replacement (-1.4 WAR, Brian Giles is the worst at -1.6), and the worst in the American League. And this is only the second year of the deal. In the first year, 2008, Wells was at 1.2 WAR according to FanGraphs. Sure, he was 2.0 WAR in 2008 according to Rally's WAR calculations, but it doesn't take much baseball knowledge to realize that a 2.0 WAR player (about league average) doesn't come close to cutting it, either.

But again, it isn't that interesting to criticize a contract in hindsight. Any contract can turn out better or worse than it seemed at the time. The question that interests me (and hopefully you, too) is whether a contract made sense at the time it was signed. Hence the Contract Retrospective.

What Did the Jays Pay For?

According to Cot's, while Wells signed the contract in December, 2006, it didn't begin until 2008. Wells can opt-out after the 2011 season, but given that the option is a player option, the Jays needed to plan for being on the hook for the whole thing. Since the contract actually began in 2008, need to use a projected 2007-2008 salary chart. Here is one by Tom Tango. To use it, simply look at the column across the top for the number of years of the contract then look down for the number of dollars (in millions). When you find the one closest to the amount of the contract, look on the right-most column to find the numbers of Wins Above Replacement the team is paying for in the first year. The chart assumes the player will decline by half-a-win a season, and also that the league dollars-per-marginal-win will inflate by 10% a season (both the dollars-per-WAR and inflation have been pretty accurate until the collapse of the economy at the end of 2008).  $126M falls right between 7/$117.3M for a 4.5 WAR player or 7/$138.2 for a 5.0 WAR player.

Which is it? One could look at it in two different ways -- either Wells accepted a slightly lower haul for long-term security, or the Jays not unreasonably thought that Wells might decline a bit more slowly than 0.5 WAR a season over the life of the contract, given that he was "only" 29 when it started. In the spirit of generosity, let's assume that he was paid like a 4.5 WAR player, that is, 4.5 WAR starting in 2008, but it's a bit trickier than that, since the contract was signed the year before it started, so like the Blue Jays we only have data through 2006, and have to figure in attrition. So he probably needed to project at at least  4.7 WAR at the time the contract was signed, at the very least...

Offense

I like to keep these retrospective projectoin (retrojections) short and simple. wOBA gives us a good offensive "total value" stat that is easy to convert to runs above average. I'll use the version implemented at FanGraphs on Wells' player page which also shows league average for each season. Again The Book (as usual), we need to regress each seasons' wOBA* against 220 plate appearances of league average. We then take a weighted average of Wells' regressed wOBA from 2003-2006 and add slight age adjustments. Here are the regressed numbers:.

Once age adjustements are factored in, we have a projected wOBA of .356 for Wells in 2007. Assuming the same weighted average for league offense levels, that projects as 16.4 runs above average per 700 plate appearances. As Tango notes, it's not a good idea to project a player to play almost every game. 150 games is pretty close to 85% payng time, and a .356 wOBA comes out to 14.6 per 150 games/625 PA.

Defense

Wells had (and to a certain extent still has) a great defensive reputation as a center fielder. Defensive metrics have come a long way, although they have the problems. I will take an average of three publicly available systems (well, two systems, three data sources) for those years: Utlimate Zone Rating as found at FanGraphs that uses data from Baseball Info Solutions (and is thus sometimes called "bUZR"), the "original" Ultimate Zone Rating that isn't public for recent years but had full data fro 2003-2006 and uses data from STATS, INC (sUZR), and Sean Smith Retrosheet-based TotalZone. I'll also add some regression to the average -- probably not enough, but this a crude methodology, anyway. The UZr numbers are both the UZR/150 numbers, and I've prorated the TotalZone (plus arm) numbers to the same playing time.

You can see the variations between systems quite clearly -- the contrast between bUZR and sUZR in 2003 is especially striking. A 5-4-3-2 weighted average of the averaged and regressed numbers is 5.7 runs above average per 150 games.

Adding it up

Wells plays center field, so that is +2.5 runs per season. The replacement level for AL position players is 25 runs/season. So 27.5 prorated for 150 game is about 23.4 runs. To, in total, we have 23.4 runs positional and  replacement level + 14.6 runs batting + 5.7 runs defense = 43.7 runs above replacement, or about 4.3 WAR.

Remember that we said the Jays were paying for somewhere between 4.5 and 5 Wins Above Replacement... which means that they seem to have come pretty close. Except that they were paying Wells that $126M starting in 2008 -- and we projected for 2007. It is closer than we thought, but attrition has to be taken into account -- if not immediatelty, over the life of the contract. So Wells was likely to be closer to a 4 WAR than a 4.75 WAR player in 2008 when the contract started. That may not seem like a lot, but according to the salary chart, that implies that something closer to $96.5M than the $126M Wells received. And that's without figuring in the long-term commitment the Jays made.

Final Thoughts

While the Jays have certainlly taken a bath since then (since the deal started, at the time of this writing, Wells has given then -0.2 Wins Below Replacement), they were actually closer than one might have thought. Still, over a long-term deal like that, even a half-win "miss" can mean a $20M loss. No, Wells injuries as well as his collapse on both offense and defense weren't foreseeable. But projections aren't predictions, that is, "densities of probabilities," so taking the "middle road," while it doesn' t eliminate all risk, means that "shooting high" is going to end up hamstringing a team more often than not.

I should add that I've always liked Vernon Wells  -- sure, we don't really "know" atheletes and celebrities, but he always has come across to me as a smart, hardworking guy, and I loved watching him play. My first full summer living in Ontario was 2003, when he and Carlos Delgado both had monster offensive first halves. In addition, I really hate the phrase "[underpeforming/injured player] is stealing money." Unless that player is faking an injury or not trying, he's living up to the terms of his contract, just as he did when he was providing 20+ his value in his free free-agency years. 

I haven't read much about the backstory, but some Jays fans have told me that they think the contract was never J.P. Ricciardi's call -- that the order came down from then Blue Jays Team P resident Paul Godfrey.Whoever called the shot, perhaps they fixated  Wells' career year in 2006 -- FanGraphs has him at 5.8 WAR after a 4.0, 3.8, and 3.1. Rally has him at 7.0 after a 5.4, 2.2, and 2.6. Another lesson -- use multiple years and account for regression to the mean and aging.

Whatever the rationale at the time, doing out best to ignore what  happened afterwards, while it might have been closer than I thought, I'd have to say now that given the data through 2006, the contract was clearly too big, and was a big mistake. This BlueJay is an albatross (sorry).