In our last dispatch, we noted the utter absurdity of a clause in Bobby Abreu’s contract that calls for the payment of a $100,000 bonus in the event that he wins a Gold Glove award. Abreu, only slightly more instinctive and athletic afield than a typical beer-leaguer, clearly has no chance of cashing in on this. But it got us to thinkin’: What are some of the other desperate, dippy and otherwise unrealistic incentives that have been shoehorned into MLB players’ contracts?

Some of the clauses weren’t as silly at the time they were granted as they seem today (the Gold Glove incentive in Jim Thome’s contract, for instance, was added before his trade to an American League team and subsequent shift to designated-hitter duty). Others haven’t yet been made public (most Yankees, we presume, have clauses in their deals guaranteeing hand-cut flowers in their lockers every afternoon and dial-a-concubine access on road trips). The ones we note below, on the other hand, made no sense from day one.

Read on and be awed. All info comes from the invaluable, wildly entertaining Cot’s Baseball Contracts.


Carlos Lee, Houston Astros: When Lee signed with the ‘Stros as a free agent in late 2006, pundits questioned whether the team was paying a premium for what he’d already accomplished, as opposed to what he’d do in the future. They also wondered how well he would age, given that he was already packing 255 pounds of something other than muscle onto his 6’2” frame. Enter the “nominal weight clause” in his deal, which likely guarantees that Lee will refrain from inhaling more than 16 White Castle sliders in a single sitting. The obvious questions: Who enforces this? Does the team have spies stationed at Houston’s myriad lard repositories? How often does he have to stand on a scale? Somebody oughta investigate.


Gil Meche, Kansas City Royals and Francisco Cordero, Cincinnati Reds: This isn’t to besmirch either player’s sporadic competence so much as to cast doubt on their prognostication skills. Both Meche and Cordero play for teams that haven’t been competitive since the first Bush administration, and yet both players saw fit to secure $100,000 bonuses in their lucrative free-agent deals for winning World Series MVP. Hope is a dangerous thing.

 

 

Mark Teixeira, New York Yankees: Teixeira’s deal pays him salaries of at least $20 million per year through 2016, plus he received a cool $5 million the second he signed on the dotted line. Presumably this means he can afford to buy anything except France or publishing rights to the Beatles catalog. Still, Teixeira doesn’t receive his Yankees season tickets gratis; his contract merely assigns him the right to purchase up to eight of them. Weird.

 

 

Mike Lincoln, Cincinnati Reds: In his eight seasons as a professional pitcher, Lincoln has started, respectively, 15, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 and 0 games. In his contract, Lincoln has a clause awarding him $50,000 for his 12th, 15th, 18th, 21st, 23rd, 25th and 27th starts. This is like incentivizing a dog for performing data entry: He doesn’t have the skills or the inclination, so why bother?

 

 

 

Orlando Hudson, Los Angeles Dodgers: Hudson, left standing when last off-season’s game of free-agent musical chairs came to an end, accepted a way-low contract right before spring training commenced. To offset the pain of earning a sub-poverty $3 million in 2009, Hudson can receive up to $4.62 million in bonuses based on plate appearances. As of Thursday, he’d earned $3.55 million; once he passes 575 plate appearances in a few weeks, he’ll earn an extra ten grand per appearance. So don’t be confused when you see Hudson make a ka-ching! gesture every time he dashes out of the batter’s box.

 

Bobby Jenks, Chicago White Sox: Not to keep harping on the Gold Glove clauses, but anyone who has seen Bobby Jenks pitch (or eat) knows that the burly-boy righty has mobility issues. This is like saying a chair or a tree has mobility issues: it’s not exactly a secret. The real silliness, however, isn’t that he gets money for winning a Gold Glove. It’s that as a late-game reliever who has thrown no more than 70 innings in a single season, he’s not on the field enough to merit even token Gold Glove consideration. In conclusion, most agents are insane optimists.