DeRosa starts the ball rolling

Accord­ing to Buster Olney, Mark DeRosa becomes the first free agent this off­sea­son to jump ship, sign­ing a three year deal with the Chicago Cubs worth approx­i­mately $13 mil­lion. DeRosa played the last two sea­sons for Texas after parts of seven with the Atlanta Braves. DeRosa just fin­ished his 6th year of ser­vice time and was eli­gi­ble for “true” free agency for the first time, although he was free to sign with whomever he chose after being non-tendered by the Braves after the 2004 sea­son. DeRosa signed a minor league con­tract with the Rangers and was invited to camp in 2005, made the 25 man ros­ter, then re-signed with Texas with a one year deal ($675k) this past off­sea­son, avoid­ing arbitration.

The Cubs sign­ing isn’t sur­pris­ing — not that they would go after DeRosa nec­es­sar­ily, but that they went right out and signed early. Last sea­son, the Cubs also made the first free agent splash, sign­ing both Bobby Howry and Scott Eyre to con­tracts. The ben­e­fit the Cubs get from the early sign­ings is that the mar­ket hasn’t been set yet. Howry and Eyre were secured for $4 mil­lion a sea­son deals, but with the Yan­kees look­ing for setup reliev­ers their prices could very well have gone higher had they not signed so early (the Yanks even­tu­ally set­tled in on Kyle Farnsworth, whom they signed for a lit­tle over $5 mil­lion a season.

While this approach seems to be pos­i­tive, you run two risks. First (and more imme­date) is mis­judg­ing the mar­ket. If a team offers a salary to a free agent and sits back and watches as sim­i­lar play­ers sign for less, it’s that team that ends up doing the oppo­site of what they intended — over­pay­ing for their “bar­gain”. The other issue is player qual­ity. More often than not, a higher qual­ity player will enter­tain numer­ous offers before decid­ing on which one he wants. This only makes sense — go to the right sit­u­a­tion or get the most money, let­ting teams bid them­selves up. So a high qual­ity player won’t sign on the first day, leav­ing the team who wants to sign early to the “sec­ond tier” — the player who knows that they’re going to get some kind of decent con­tract but whose value is more than likely going to be deter­mined by other sign­ings. After all, you turn to your sec­ond choice when your first becomes too expen­sive, but how do you know what to offer your sec­ond choice if you don’t know what your first wants?

In the Cubs case, let’s say that they went out and signed Howry and Eyre (two mid­dle reliev­ers who have had mod­er­ate suc­cess but nei­ther had made more than $1.7 mil­lion in a sea­son), com­mit­ting $23 mil­lion to the two of them over the next three sea­sons. Con­tent with their bullpen, they find out later that B.J. Ryan, whom they con­sid­ered to be out of their price range with his per­ceived con­tract demands, is only ask­ing for a lit­tle under $7 mil­lion a sea­son — con­sid­ered to be a bar­gain at that price (note: Ryan signed a five year, $47 mil­lion con­tract last off­sea­son). While Ryan would be great for the Cubs to acquire, the team has already com­mit­ted $23 mil­lion in con­tracts to reliev­ers (not count­ing those already on the ros­ter: Ryan Demp­ster re-signed for $5 mil­lion+ per, Glen­don Rusch for $3 mil­lion per), mean­ing that the Cubs would effec­tively be spend­ing twice to get what they wanted in the first place. If Ryan at $6.75 mil­lion per were avail­able, then the Cubs don’t sign Howry or Eyre — maybe one, but not both. But in sign­ing both and com­mit­ting the money early, they end up re-spending to get a “bar­gain”, which ends up cost­ing them more since the cost is both the player they wanted’s con­tract and the con­tract of the player they signed try­ing to beat the rush.

Yeah, I con­fused myself there. On to DeRosa — the guy has always hit left­ies well, but he man­aged to put together a solid sea­son at the plate, get­ting career highs in every­thing while play­ing in 136 games and putting up a .296/.357/.456 line. It’s assumed that DeRosa is being signed to be the Cubs start­ing sec­ond base­man, but that takes away one of DeRosa’s best qual­i­ties — his abil­ity to play most of the posi­tions on the field. DeRosa started at 6 dif­fer­ent posi­tions for the Rangers last sea­son (not count­ing DH), but the Cubs appar­ently want to use him as a sec­ond base­man exclusively.