This isn’t the first time David Dombrowski has answered a damn-the-torpedoes call from ownership by blowing somebody out of the water.
It was Montreal Expos owner Charles Bronfman who told Dombrowski – then known as The Boy GM – in 1989 that time was wasting and he wanted what Dombrowski understood to be one last shot at the postseason. So the Expos shocked the baseball world by acquiring Mark Langston from the Seattle Mariners for Randy Johnson, Gene Harris and Brian Holman.
The Expos were one of the stories of that season before collapsing in August en route to finishing fourth in the National League East. Langston left as a free agent and Bronfman promptly put his stake in the team up for sale and there it was. Forget the handy scapegoating of Jeffrey Loria; Major League Baseball in Montreal had taken its first step out the door.
The results will be far less Draconian if Dombrowski’s latest shocker doesn’t turn out. There is no indication that Detroit Tigers owner Mike Ilitch is about to sell the team any time soon, but he will be 83 and the Tigers, frankly, owe him a World Series.
From a baseball point of view, Dombrowski’s agreement on Tuesday with Prince Fielder on a nine-year, $214-million (all currency U.S.) contract probably carries less risk than that Langston deal. It’s just money, after all, and the Tigers have shown an ability to manage payrolls. Detroit’s a happening place for sports these days.
Dombrowski must surely realize that Ilitch’s lifetime as a sportsman is at the legacy stage, what with the NHL due to turn its annual outdoor classic next season into a celebration of his ownership of the Detroit Red Wings, so why not roll the dice with Fielder?
The Tigers could have been favourites heading into the season without Fielder, even with designated hitter Victor Martinez out for the season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament. But talk about taking no chances. In landing Fielder, they have a left-hand hitting monster mashing behind righty hitting cleanup man Miguel Cabrera.
Fielder, a three-time all-star, hit .299 with 38 home runs and 120 RBIs last season with the Milwaukee Brewers. He has averaged 40 homers and 113 RBIs over the past five years. He’s also been among the most durable players in the majors, appearing in at least 157 games in each of the last six seasons.
It’s a lot of money to have tied up in, um, soft-bodied, beer-league types (Cabrera, who said Tuesday he will move to third base if manager Jim Leyland wants him to, has four years left on an eight-year, $152.3-million contract, and Martinez will have two more years remaining on a four-year, $50-million deal if he recovers as expected in time for the 2013 season).
But it will matter naught if Ilitch wins the World Series. If he doesn’t? At least Dombrowski won’t have to watch anybody pitch his way to the Hall of Fame the way Johnson did after he was dealt away from the Expos.
So baseball learns once again that it is never wise to laugh at Scott Boras, Fielder’s agent, who told anybody who would listen early in the off-season that the starting price for Fielder was more than the annual average value of existing contracts signed by Mark Teixeira ($22.5-million a year) and Joe Mauer ($23-million a year). Oh yeah, and Fielder’s contract would be for 10 years, thanks. Admit it, some of you laughed.
Yet here we are, unusually late by free-agent signing standards (Carlos Delgado waited until Jan. 25 to sign a contract with the Florida Marlins in 2005), and Boras gets the money and the terms he wanted. All this in an off-season in which two of the usual market movers, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, had already committed to first basemen (Teixeira and Adrian Gonzalez, respectively), in which the Los Angeles Dodgers were hampered by cloudy ownership, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim had already cast their lot with Albert Pujols, and the Chicago Cubs, mysteriously, went into hibernation.
What of the Toronto Blue Jays in all this? The guess here is the team kicked the tires on Fielder just as it did with Jose Reyes, but more with an eye toward sussing out the market. (Nine years? Sorry, I’m not having that, not for any player.)
The Blue Jays are going to try to kill teams with relief pitching and homegrown hitting this season, their front office believing it is pointless to test the resolve of team owner Rogers Communications Inc. In the meantime, they are among a group of teams whose road to the promised land of the wild card just became a whole lot harder. But that’s just off-season conjecture and guesstimation.
What we know for sure is this: He who laughs last has Mike Ilitch’s phone number, and that he who laughs best is almost always named Scott Boras.
With a report from The Associated Press
