Well, not that it's relevant, but in the first 2 pages of
the Price thread I see 7 posts calling the money stupid or insane, 13 unambiguously positive including you at #93, a few calling it an overpay (2) or being critical about various things (4), and then a devolution into discussing the merits of his 3-year opt-out. Certainly a more positive set of knee-jerks from SoSH, overall.
But the problem with using that as a proxy is that you can't run a team by mob rule - people might "hate" the Sandoval signing but I guarantee they would have hated starting the season with Middlebrooks or Cecchini holding down 3B for the big club, likely even more. We need to evaluate the signing in the context of the other options, and I've yet to see an argument that there was an objectively better option for the club at that point in time. That's why all the whining now sounds like monday morning quarterbacking to me.
At that point, the 3 ML-ready 3B prospects in the league were among the top 15 prospects in all of baseball (Bryant, Gallo, Franco) and clearly Theo, the Twins and Phillies were not going to make them available. Tomas was not a known quantity in MLB, so the D-backs (quite wisely, as it turns out) were not parting with Lamb - at least, I'm unable to find rumors to that effect from searching Rotoworld. Headley signed for 4 years / $13M per, aka 68% of Panda's AAV; do you really think that if SoSH were offered a choice of Panda at $19 or Headley at $13, they'd have chosen the latter? And likewise, Donaldson was traded
3 days after Sandoval signed; I'm sure we were in the bidding, but were unwilling or unable to part with what it would have taken to top the Jays' offer.
Of the
top 15 3Bs by 2014 bWAR, one (Donaldson) was traded in the offseason. The rest went nowhere. We're glad we didn't trade for Rendon, or Josh Harrison. 8 were clearly unavailable (Seager, Justin Turner, Arenado, Plouffe, Longoria, Wright, Carpenter, Machado). David Wright is owed a fortune and was coming off a down year. Frazier, now of CWS, was going into his 1st year of arb with CIN and was traded a year later, but was probably not yet available. The Yankees were clearly not trading us Prado. Juan Uribe was clearly available - and could have held down a passable 3B for $6.5M last year. But he's the only real option I can surface who, in retrospect, might have worked for us as a 1-2 year bridge. The only other guys available were Headley and Sandoval.
If there was a rising cry of "WHY NOT URIBE?!" from SoSH, then I will withdraw my argument. But from what I remember reading about our 3B predicament, the discussion was dominated by criticisms of
all available options - but nobody could propose any choice that a lot of people liked. It was a limited and poor set of options, and second guessing Cherington's choice to go with the best available FA seems like sour grapes more than an honest evaluation of what we could have known - and done - at the time.
