In the hours after the news broke yesterday that Jason Heyward had signed with the Cubs, it initially appeared that something remarkable had happened—that Heyward had turned down an offer from the Cardinals in excess of $200 million and taken nearly $20 million less to play for Chicago. This quickly caused a great deal of angst among Cards fans, but it was just as quickly revealed not to really be true at all. The Cubs offered Heyward a shorter contract with a higher annual salary, and included two opt-outs in the deal, allowing Heyward to renegotiate for an even better contract twice over the next eight years and dramatically raising the dollar figure he stands to earn by accepting it.
It’s highly misleading, then, to claim that the Cardinals offered “more” and that Heyward took “less” to become a Cub. That hasn’t stopped the likes of Deadspin from doing so in order to taunt Cards fans about how desperate Heyward must have been to get away from their decrepit racist backwater of a city (just kidding, though, lighten up!). And it didn’t stop Post-Dispatch columnist Benjamin Hochman from writing this in today’s paper:
How could Jason Heyward not want to be with the 11-time world champions? That is the takeaway of Friday – not only that Heyward is gone (and not only is Heyward gone to that team in blue), but also that Heyward chose not to be a Cardinal, and did so after, as Derrick Goold reported, the Cards actually offered him the most overall money.
What else could the Cardinals have done? We begged them to splurge, and they did, and they still didn’t get the guy.
Hochman doesn’t explicitly say anything that’s not true—the Cardinals did indeed offer “the most overall money”—but his entire column is built around the idea that John Mozeliak put the best, strongest offer on the table and the club was “jilted” simply because it “couldn’t offer Kris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo… [or] manager Joe Maddon, Mr. Fun… [or] ivy on the outfield walls.” And that’s bullshit. Heyward signed for the Cubs for the same reason that virtually every free agent in history has signed for their new club: because they offered a better deal.
And that means that once again—after years of assurances about “significant increases” and “payroll muscle,” months after inking a new billion-dollar television contract, and days after talk of the club’s “very aggressive” offseason approach and its need to “change with [the game]”—Mozeliak and owner Bill DeWitt chickened out of a bidding war. It means that DeWitt, whose club ranked 23rd last season in opening-day payroll as a percentage of total revenue, let that club’s most valuable player slip away to an ascendant division rival over what would have registered, on the balance sheets of baseball’s sixth-most valuable and single most profitable franchise, as a rounding error.
It’s fair to watch this happen—again—and wonder just how sincere all that talk of a higher payroll and free-agent market ambition really was. It’s fair to reflect on why Bill DeWitt is portrayed without exception as an owner who is committed to winning above all else when the numbers rank his level of on-field investment as just above Fred Wilpon’s and not a great deal higher than Jeffrey Loria’s. It’s fair to ask whether the obvious answer—the Cards win, while those other clubs mostly don’t—is really the product of DeWitt’s overriding desire to put a winning team on the field, or simply of a four-year run of prospect-powered good fortune that followed, it can be easy to forget, a four-year period of futility that had many convinced late in the 2011 season that something was seriously wrong. It’s fair, with the Pirates surging and the Cubs building a juggernaut and many of the Cards’ scouting and development wizards brain-drained away and, oh yeah, a federal corporate espionage investigation hanging over the club’s head, to worry about just how quickly the Cardinals could find themselves back in a similar place.
In short, it’s fair—and important, if only in the narrow and ridiculous way that anything to do with sports is important—to ask questions, to be skeptical, to hold people accountable when their words don’t match their actions. If you want that sort of treatment for DeWitt and Mozeliak and their latest failure to live up to the expectations they’ve set for themselves, you’ll get it on Twitter; you’ll get it on VEB; you’ll get it, thankfully, from Bernie Miklasz. But it sure doesn’t seem like you’re going to be getting it from the Post-Dispatch.
Photo by Arturo Pardavila III