[The United Cardinal Bloggers' roundtable continues, with yesterday's question from Andrew Miller of Busch Birds.]

Once the World Series ends I will begin anxiously waiting for an extension between the Cardinals and Albert Pujols. I am confident that it will happen, but I don’t know what to expect in length or value. Do you think it will look more like Joe Mauer’s contract or Ryan Howard’s contract? Or will it look different than either one? What kind of contract would you like to see? Are you worried about signing Pujols to a big deal that runs deep into his 30’s?

What will Albert Pujols’s next contract look like? We’ll guess something like a six-year, $180 million deal is in range, though not necessarily with the Cardinals. Yes, we would be worried about signing him for his decline years, which may come sooner than we all expect. After all, his 2010 season represented a 16% decline from 2009, value-wise. As Bill James wrote, "Ballplayers, as a group, reach their peak value much earlier and decline much more rapidly than people believe."

As Andrew Moses rightly pointed out, James’s observation dealt with ballplayers as a group and that exceptional players don’t tend to decline quite as quickly. (Jeremy Greenhouse posted an insightful article on the topic.) Even still, Pujols — assuming he won’t delay the natural aging process via performance-enhancing drugs — remains subject to decline, albeit perhaps not as severe. So it’s worth considering another exceptional player, Lance Berkman, one of Pujols’s contemporary comparables, according to Baseball Reference. Berkman, as someone just a few years older may offer a preview of what is to come for Pujols: After posting a 6.7 WAR in his age-32 season, Big Puma has followed with WARs of 3.1 and 1.4. And he’s only 34. Part of Berkman’s decline has been due to injury, but there again, Pujols is not immune. He may have avoided serious problems so far, but his health record is far from spotless, and his body type — 6′3", 230 lbs. — isn’t much different from Berkman’s — 6′1, 230 lbs. (and remember that Berkman was still playing outfield at Pujols’s age).

But what about Pujols’s career trajectory on his own terms? Has he, entering his age-31 season, peaked? Let’s look at his batting (park-adjusted runs above average), fielding (fielding runs above average) and wins above replacement over his career:

All three areas appear to have peaked, and most noticeably, Pujols’s defense has plummeted, not merely in one season, but steadily over the last three. Since that hitting line is less clear, let’s break it down into a couple of peripheral rate stats — walk and strikeout rates:

Both rates appear to have peaked, though the walk rate is still “peaking.” But that Pujols’s career has crested is probably not news; the real question is not whether Pujols has peaked but how long he will take to decline, and how significant the decline will be.

Using his career WAR values, we can at least take a stab at it. Let’s assume that the Cardinal do extend Pujols’s contract this winter (granted, a big assumption). And for the purpose of simply having a number, we’ll assume it looks something we noted above and looks like this:

*2011 is restructured from $16 million to $22 million.

That would make Pujols’s value-to-cost chart look like this:

In that scenario, the Cardinals might expect to get two seasons of surplus value before a breakeven point in 2013. After that, the deficit value they incur depends on how fast Pujols declines. But on an extension that adds six years to his tenure, at least four could be negatives.

This entry was posted by Pip on Friday, October 29th, 2010 at 2:22 pm 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.