Pujols Talks Contract

Albert Pujols spoke about the process that brought him to the Angels in 2012:

Pujols addressed his 2012 decision to sign with the Angels over the St. Louis Cardinals in an interview on “In Depth with Graham Bensinger,” which is airing in syndication this weekend. During the interview, recorded in spring training, Pujols told Bensinger that he didn’t appreciate the way the Cardinals handled negotiations at the time.

“I felt that the approach that they took wasn’t showing me that they wanted me to be a long-time Cardinal,” Pujols said, adding “I believe I made the right decision.”

ESPN.com

The Pujols contract should have been a wake up call to the MLBPA that the free agent market was shifting. The Cardinals made a lot of money off Pujols’s first decade in the majors, getting his production rather cheaply. The Cardinals did not want to pay for the decline, and were very happy to see the Angels do so. Pujols generated about $460 million in value during his career according to FanGraphs, so even if the Cardinals had signed him to a $300 million, ten-year contract, they would have come out ahead over the length of Pujols’s career. The Cardinals made the better business decision to quit while they were way ahead.

If the union had realized at that point that teams were going to stop paying for past performance, they could have started moving money to younger players. We’ll see if they finally got that message.

from baseballmusings.com http://bit.ly/2G54OjR