Still not convinced that Adrian Gonzalez really wants to play for the Padres long term

To out of towners, he talks up the team and city. To local outlets, the ambivalence shows up. I think the ambivalence comes from his doubts about the team’s ownership – it’s still in transition. If he’s been voting at gaslamp, his rating probably hasn’t budged from “5” all season.

He admits he took less money with his 4-year-plus-option contract for “stability”, but his pay has been way below his production. Including this year, he’s made $10.1 million in his career. This year’s salary, $4.775 million plus a $25k All Star bonus ($4.8 million total) is nearly half his total earnings, so he’s been grossly underpaid. It probably doesn’t look to him like the Padres ownership will ever make up for that.

I figure the Padres will make him an offer (short in years and dollars) after the season, and if he doesn’t take it, he’ll be traded. He probably figures that too.

Or even the owners. They would love to sign him, but cannot. If you believe they lost $8m last year, as Moores has said, how can they?

Even if they win the WS, the economic base for the Padres is pretty constrained. Salaries are already correlated with market value at about .90. Some analysis I did:

http://stokes-analysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/mlb-payroll.html

That is market size, not some metric that factors in recent success. So even if we signed Adrian, won a WS or two, I doubt we would still be able to keep him. For small market teams, profits and competitiveness are not necessarily correlated, though I think they are for large market teams.

Especially with the small amount of revenue sharing we have, it may be profit maximizing over the intermediate run to field a cheap, mediocre/bad team than to field a competitive much more expensive team. Of course cheap and good is great, but that is what all the bottom 15 teams are trying to do, so not very easy to do and arguably impossible to sustain.

one problem with taking a “home town” discount is that surplus value goes to the club. so let’s say gonzalez decides, hey, i will take 30% less than i could get to stay in SD. but still being the biggest payroll item on the team, a few years later, we end up in a peavy situation. he has to be traded because the team’s prospects look bad and they need to fill too many holes. now he is even more valuable to the club because he is cheaper than he should be, so the club gets that excess value, not the player.

any one know the restrictions on allowing the player to get some of that excess value? for example, let’s say he would agree to a pay scale if he played in SD that was affordable to SD, but, if traded, his pay scale jumps to non-discounted amount, including the prior years lost value. this creates an incentive for the club to keep him. but if they do trade, he gets his money back. or at least a portion of it.