I know I’m much more pessimistic on Zito than most, but I can’t fathom how anyone thinks this is a good deal. I bet 29 GMs are laughing today.

28…Bavasi is probably pissed…

I’ve said all off-season that the Zito contract would be the worst free agent signing of the winter and it pretty much is. (Dave has it #2 but Zito and Lee are both orders of magnitude of horrible above the others and it’s hard to pick one over the other.)

I know I’m much more pessimistic on Zito than most, but I can’t fathom how anyone thinks this is a good deal. I bet 29 GMs are laughing today.

I still can’t believe that the Giants, having signed Zito for his year 29-30-31-32-33-34-35 seasons, wanted to make sure they got that option year in there. Because obviously that age-36 season… I mean, what? I guess there’s no additional risk to them: if salaries have doubled another couple of times and teams are paying $30m/win, that’ll look great.

Dude, this is Brian Sabean we’re talking about. At age 36, Zito will just be getting into the proper San Francisco Giant age range. Mind you, he’ll probably still get called “rook” by 2014 Opening Day center fielder Marquis Grissom and Bonds would probably call him something too except that by then his head will be so large that his vocal cords will only be able to produce sounds too low in pitch to be audible by normal humans.

But it just gets tiresome having to have one of the same four or five conversations in every thread. Before we can discuss any free agent signing, we almost always have to have the “why do you guys take this so seriously?” and the “free agents are worth what the market will bear” conversation BEFORE we can actually discuss the signing itself.

And often, the thread never gets back on track because of having to have those conversations, among others.

It just gets frustrating, because it feels like I’m reading the same thread over and over.

In that market, a large number of apartments are held at below ‘market’ rates by rent control laws. By analogy these apartments are the team controlled, minimum pay players — they may be great apartments with hugely attractive features (the King Felix apartments if you will) but they’re still dirt cheap to the lucky occupant. In contrast to such bargains there are apartments that have become free of rent controls. But they are relatively few on the market, and hence even a mediocre free market apartment may command a high price, while a really good (King Felix) apartment is worth millions. And to complete the analogy, consider rent control and free market apartments iin buildings that are about to go condo in a year or two or three, and hence, lose all value as apartments (we’ll leave off options value here) — these represent the aging, veteran players whose contracts are effected by even more uncertainty and externality and hence will be priced lower than comparable units, free or rent controlled, in building of more certain durability.

So, yeah, there’s a ‘market’ for apartments in New York just like there was a ‘market’ for Barry Zito. But to make sweeping statements that any given transaction in a market with such imperfections and external constraints represents themarket for that particular kind of apartment…well, it just ain’t true.

So Sabean is a jerk that only cares about what happens to himself and not to the people in the organization around him? I mean, I suppose it’s possible, but I guess I’d like to think that Sabean isn’t that self-centered.

I think the other motivations and actions are equally as interesting and discussable.

To a certain degree I believe that other motivations are interesting in discussing why a move was made. Generally, however, I disagree that these things are equally as interesting to discuss, especially with regards to whether or not a contract was a good value. We can sit here and speculate on why in the name of Pete that Sabean made this decision, but no one really has any solid evidence, so it doesn’t seem like an especially productive discussion to me.

On the other hand, we have a lot of performance data (stats-wise and scouting-wise) on Zito, especially since he’s a veteran, so we’re in a relatively good position to evaluate the contract on the merits of how it helps the Giants win games over the next seven years. Now certainly different reasonable people can differ in how they interpret the data or how they interpret other observations, but those discussions are more interesting to me because we have tools to evalute the different ways of interpreting the data that give us pretty solid evidence about when certain methods of evaluation are accurate and when they are not accurate.

If your position is that the first two or three years of Zito’s contract aren’t that bad, but the last four or five are a big risk that Sabean took for non-performance based reasons, I don’t think many people will take much issue with that. If your position is that Sabean had a good reason (rather than just some reason) to take on that additional risk, that’s where I think you’ll get the biggest disagreement here. There’s something like a $50M gap between what Zito’s projected performance-related value is and what Sabean decided to pay him. That’s just too big of a gap to consider this a good idea regardless of how many non-performance factors we can think up.