Although they're are six games above .500, expectations heading into the season were much, much higher.
Take it from the so-called experts. All but one of Sports Illustrated's thirteen MLB experts picked the Cubs to don the NL Central crown (the one being the Great Joe Posnanski) and five believed they'd end the curse and win the World Series. Over at ESPN, seventeen of their twenty MLB experts agreed with SI for divisional superiority and three selected them to win the last game of the year.
Interested in placing the blame on a single Cub? Look no further than Alfonso Soriano who just announced he's calling it quits. With season-ending knee surgery, the left fielder completes year three of an eight year, $136 million contract where he earned $16 million and hit .241/.303/.423. Uncharacteristically, he wasn't even an asset on the basepaths (only nine steals) and according to the advanced fielding metric UZR, he was just about the worst left fielder in the game.
$16 million for a bad hitter, bad fielder, and marginal baserunner... add it all up and I was sure he was a shoe-in as the most overpaid player of 2009.
But is he? I was curious to find out so I busted out FanGraphs' value system that converts Wins Above Replacement (WAR) into dollar amounts where we can see player contributions in $ form. Nifty, huh?. With salary figures on hand in a database, it's a simple calculation.
Here are the most overpaid players of the year.
The only conclusion I see: knowing his impending fate as baseball's most overpaid player, Soriano took matter into his own hands and opted for season-ending knee surgery.
Something tells me Jose Guillen calls Mike Scioscia everyday to make sure he penciled Gary Matthews Jr in the lineup. For now the honor is all Guillen's.
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