Sunday, December 10, 2006

How the Giants Overpaid for a Juicer

I have been chuckling with glee ever since news broke on how much the San Francisco Giants ended up offering to Barry Bonds--reportedly $16M plus $4M in additional performance incentives--given the lack of competitive interest in the slugger from ANY other team, underlined by the desperate move of Bonds to attend the Winter Meetings in person (as if any team on the fence wanted to see the circus first-hand). The Giants basically negotiated against themselves and bid up their own price to return Bonds, when no one else would have him.

I had planned on writing a post which detailed how out of whack this offer was, but then I found this piece from former LA Times writer Scott Ostler,now with the San Francisco Comical. His recap of the Bonds "negotiations" is priceless:

When Barry Bonds' agent guaranteed a few weeks ago that his client "will be in a major-league uniform in 2007," the only uniform I could imagine was Lou Seal's.

I was right about one thing: I labeled as ridiculous the reports that Bonds would demand $14 million to play in '07.

Maybe Barry's agent simply got beat up by the Giants.

Agent: "We demand $14 million!"

Giants: "Ridiculous. We have a budget. Our offer is $20 million."

Agent: "Insulting! We'll go $15 million, but that's our ceiling."

Giants: "We'll give Barry $18 million and not a penny less."

Ostler goes on to tell how the Giants, concerned that there was a "mystery team" negotiating with Bonds at the Winter Meetings, pulled the sophomoric stunt of sending employees to the meetings to pose as reporters, in order to find out more information. No truth to the rumor that they asked Bobby Valentine for guidance on fake-mustache disguises.

2 comments:

Orel said...

I had to Google "Lou Seal."

I think Barry's head is bigger than Lou Seal's.

Steve Sax said...

Maybe that's one of Barry's performance incentives: shrinking his head to a size smaller than Lou Seal's?