Daily Jolt: Manny Being Awfully Greedy

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday.

Good for the Dodgers. Good for the McCourt family and even for (gulp) general manager Ned Colletti. Mercurial slugger Manny Ramirez has rejected the Dodgers' fourth contract offer this winter, rumored to be a two-year, $45 million deal that featured a $20 million player-only option in the second year of the contract.

Los Angeles' management has apparently had enough.

"We want Manny back, but we feel we are negotiating against ourselves," said owner Frank McCourt in a press release on the team's Web site. "When his agent finds those 'serious offers' from other clubs, we'll be happy to re-start the negotiations."

Then came the real jab. "Even with an economy that has substantially eroded since last November, out of respect for Manny and his talents, we actually improved our offer."

From the outside, the Dodgers seem like a dysfunctional organization. Colletti has made more than his fair share of blunders (Juan Pierre, Andruw Jones, Jason Schmidt), the McCourts seem to dabble too much in the day-to-day operations of the club and even the clubhouse hasn't been perfectly tranquil the last few years, though the arrival of Joe Torre last season has helped.

So knowing all of that, it wouldn't be surprising if this was just a bluff and Colletti was announcing a new three-year deal with Ramirez by early next week, but here's hoping it is not. Here's hoping the Dodgers stick to their guns and keep telling Ramirez where to stick it.

Let's get all the niceties out of the way. Ramirez is bound for Cooperstown. He is the sweetest-swinging right-handed hitter around and, on a personal level, one of the most entertaining players I have ever covered. He also performed miracles last year after he was traded from Beantown to Mannywood, putting up a .396/.489/.743 (AVG/OBP/SLG) line and driving in one run per game as L.A. stormed to the division title and the NLCS.


But the Dodgers aren't paying for last year, as great as it was. They're paying for the next one, two, maybe three seasons, and an offer that would have made Ramirez the second highest paid player in the game in 2009 is more than generous. It's too generous.

This isn't a condemnation of Ramirez's behavior during his final days with the Red Sox. It isn't a treatise about how he should hustle more. And it certainly isn't a manifesto on how baseball players are spoiled millionaires making far too much money to play a children's game in such difficult times.

It's simple baseball economics.

Ramirez will turn 37 this May, and unless he's swilling and injecting a BALCO cocktail, his best days are not to come. Fangraphs' Dave Cameron pegged Ramirez as a $29.4 million player in 2008, but he was worth only $4.3 million the year before and in the $14-15 million the three seasons before that.

Just eyeballing it, Ramirez is probably worth around $15-18 million. Even if you're wildly optimistic about his draw at the gate as one of the game's biggest stars, that doesn't get you to $25 million.

The Dodgers have overpaid in every offer they've made to Ramirez this winter, and that's even before you adjust for the depressed free agent market, the lack of suitors for him and the flood of corner outfielders available that set the market. Adam Dunn got $20 million over two years. Pat Burrell got $16 million over the same span. Bobby Abreu had to settle for a comparatively paltry $5 million.

Ramirez is better than all those players, but he's not worth $15 million more than Dunn next year or $9 million more in 2009 than Burrell over the next two.

The beauty of the Dodgers' latest offer is that Ramirez could have pocketed the money from an over-market contract this year, and then re-entered the market next year, when presumably the economy will have recovered and there will be fewer big corner bats as alternatives. If it doesn't bounce back that quickly, there's another $20 million waiting for him in 2010.

But that's not good enough for Manny. Pride and ego? Sure, Ramirez is a Hall of Famer and he wants to be paid like one. But he actually would be if he accepted Los Angeles' latest offer. No, this is mostly about greed, and Gordon Gekko is nowhere to be found.

Who knows? Maybe Ramirez's agent Scott Boras will pull another rabbit out of his hat and get his client the deal he wants, but the Dodgers shouldn't do anything else to make that happen, not after four good faith offers.

Either way, Planet Manny -- a place known for dreadlocks, goofy smiles, bathroom breaks in the Green Monster and mile-long moonshots -- is a less fun place to be these days.

That's what happens when the man who runs it has contract demands from another world.