[For the next 10 days, we'll be participating in the United Cardinal Bloggers Fall roundtable discussion, in which a member blogger poses a question to the group each day. Our turn to pose a question is next Monday; today's question comes from Michael Riehn of Whiteyball.]

How much should the Cardinals spend to sign Matt Holliday? (Please give your answer in total value and average annual value.) What is your Plan B if they don’t resign him? Does the fact that we gave up Brett Wallace+ to add Holliday, or that he qualifies as a type A free agent (First round draft pick plus supplemental pick between first and second round), factor into your decision?

Before we get into contract numbers, here are a few points that shape our thinking:

1. As Nick from Pitchers (used to) Hit Eighth and others have noted, the loss of Brett Wallace et al is a sunk cost, and whether to sign Holliday must be viewed on its own merits. In reality, though, general managers are a lot like politicians, and they can be emotionally invested in a strategy or chain of decisions, and are suspectible to how they are perceived by the public. John Mozeliak hasn’t given any indication of it, and has generally impressed us as the opposite, a calm, dispassionate decision-maker. The most apt analog is his predecessor’s compounding the mistake of trading a top prospect for an accomplished vet, then overpaying that vet to stay. Mozeliak must avoid making the same mistake.

2. The question of whether ownership is committed to winning — a.k.a., the Pujols Contract Extension Demand — has been answered, resoundingly. Most recently, the team mortgaged a good part of its future (not to mention parted with some significant leverage against Pujols in Wallace) to ensure a division championship. More generally, the team wrapped up the decade as the league’s best team. Ownership continues to spend in the top third of baseball on payroll despite being in the bottom third in adjusted market size. Unless Pujols has an unreasonably high burden of "competitive" and therefore isn’t bargaining in good faith, we need to move on from Pujols’s possible rent seeking.

3. As for Plan B, what is the cost of replacing Holliday? That is, what is the club’s outlook for corner outfielders coming up through their system in the next couple of years? Daryl Jones, Allen Craig and Jon Jay are nearing the major-league level. Despite losing the top-line production of Holliday, the team could reap more overall value from one or more of them over a four- to six-year period. And remember: "True shortage of talent almost never occurs at the left end of the defensive spectrum." Add to the value that the team’s current prospects can provide the value of draft picks that the team would receive from a departing Holliday, and the gap closes further.

4. There’s little to no evidence to believe that Holliday provided any significant level of "protection" for Pujols specifically in 2009. Before Holliday arrived on the scene, Pujols had OBP/SLG/GPA numbers of .450/.711/.380. After? .433/.586/.341. In other words, Pujols’s performance actually went down after the Holliday trade.

5. "Ballplayers, as a group, reach their peak value much earlier and decline much more rapidly than people believe." True, that’s as a group. But looking at the decline in value in Holliday’s three most-recent seasons, it’s hard to imagine that he’s going to suddenly slow his decline.

So what’s a fair offer? Using the WAR projection spreadsheet from Beyond the Boxscore and the projections at BaseballProjection (which provides neutral park/league stats), along with some of our own extrapolating, we came up with a rough outline of Holliday’s future value. The numbers may be a bit conservative after his above-expectations 2009 campaign, but our assumption that his defense will remain constant probably offsets that:

Rounding up, Holliday is going to be worth about $90 million over six years ($15/year) and about $80 million over five ($16/year). The Cardinals should offer either of those contracts to Holliday and his agent, Scott Boras, with a gentle but firm message: Take it or leave it. They’ve won with Matt Holliday, and they’ve won without him. They can do so again.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 10:49 am and is filed under analysis, group blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.