Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Newsletter Excerpt, December 26, 2018 -- "The Brotherhood of the Traveling Contract"

This is an excerpt from the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider. Joe Sheehan is a founding member of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to Sports Illustrated and Baseball America. He has been writing about baseball for more than 20 years.

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"This trade wasn’t designed to do that, anyway. This trade is just the latest example of a team wanting to not pay Matt Kemp to play baseball for them, and finding a creative way to do so. In the last 2 1/2 years, Kemp has been traded for Hector Olivera, who never played again; for Scott Kazmir, who will probably never play again; and for Homer Bailey, who was the third-worst pitcher in baseball over the last two years, while being paid $44 million.

"Matt Kemp didn’t sign the worst contract in baseball history, but he did sign, perhaps, the most interesting contract in baseball history."