SixFourThree

Stephen Strasburg has 15 million reasons to be happy.

Luckily for the Nationals, they inked a deal at the last minute with “the best pitching prospect ever,” Stephen Strasburg. The deal is reportedly for four years and in excess of $15 million, which shatters the previous record $10.5 million Mark Prior received in 2001.

The whole Strasburg drama created quite an unnecessary stir leading up to the deadline. Besides the ridiculous hoopla made over the negotiations going slowly (as if he was ever going to sign before 11:30 p.m. Monday night), the thing that was most bothersome to me was the pundits who made ridiculous comparisons and argued the Nats should not break the bank for this guy.

Perhaps the most common comparison seen over the last few weeks was the one between Strasburg and the previous “best pitching prospect ever,” Prior. Analysts cited Prior, Ben McDonald, and others as reasons why Strasburg would not pan out and shouldn’t receive some earth-shattering bonus. Aside from the ignorance of assuming that totally different people with totally different circumstances could portend the future of someone else (and ignoring that Strasburg is universally considered better than any of those guys), the thing that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to realize how beneficial it is to shell out money for top-tier prospects.

Prior’s case is undoubtedly the most commonly cited. He came out of USC with his polished, clean delivery, a 95-plus mph heater, and three pitches ready to dominate the league and head off to Cooperstown in 15 years. After receiving his then-record contract, arm injuries derailed Prior’s career, and the Padres released him in April. And so his case was highlighted as to why the Nationals should not spend too much on Strasburg.

But was Prior really a bust? Maybe in terms of unrealistic expectations. But let’s not forget those expectations arose not only from scouting reports but also from what he actually did. In Prior’s first full year in the majors, he went 18-6 with a 2.43 ERA, finished third in the Cy Young voting, and helped lead the Cubs to the NLCS. The team came within Steve Bartman’s interference (or more importantly and much more forgotten, a booted double play ball by Alex Gonzalez) of making the World Series for the first time since 1945.

Wasn’t that season alone worth $10.5 million? Salaries then are not what they are today, but there were exactly 40 players in the 2003 season who made $10.5 million. Included in that list are pitchers like Kevin Appier, Darren Dreifort, and Chan Ho Park. Maybe more to the point is that future Hall of Famers like Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, Mike Mussina, and Pedro Martinez all made more than $10.5 million that season…and nobody considered them overpaid despite the fact that every single one of them had a worse season that year than Prior.

For his career, Prior finished (and I’m assuming he’s finished even though he has not yet officially retired) 42-29, with a very respectable .592 winning percentage (which, as a point of reference, is a full 66 points ahead of Nolan Ryan’s). He had a lifetime 3.51 ERA and was better than the league average in every season until his last, at age 25, when he was clearly pitching injured. No, Prior will never be the Hall of Famer that most people expected when he burst onto the scene, but he was certainly worth a $10.5 million investment.

There’s no way to know what Strasburg will do in his career. If he was on the open market, however, even in this depressed economy, he would make far more than $15 million in his first two years as a pro; in fact my best guess is that teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, or Mets would probably offer him something in the range of 6 years/$90 million, which averages out to $15 million a year. Don’t believe me? Just remember that the Red Sox forked out more than $100 million for five years of Daisuke Matsuzaka.

But more importantly, the biggest thing to remember here is that history actually supports the Nats’ decision to hand over money to Strasburg. It is incredibly unlikely he will not produce $15 million worth of value over the next four years, and that’s before we even get into the whole marketing aspect and consider that his debut will likely be the Nats’ first sellout since opening their new park last year. Prior may not have lived up to the expectations, but he certainly lived up to his contract.

–Aiken