COMMENTARY : Mediocre Pitching Doesn’t Come Cheap

The best things in life are still free. Mediocre pitching, on the other hand, is going to set you back at least $2 million a year. This is what passes for logic at baseball’s winter meetings.

“How do you explain it?” Oakland General Manager Sandy Alderson said Tuesday, fixing his questioner with a bemused grin. “Panic.”

Cabin fever might be more accurate. The longer these meetings go on, the more you get the sense that the baseball people were shocked to find they had come to a place with a real winter. No golf, no tennis--nothing to spend all that money on except each other’s ballplayers. And so spend they do.

Three notable examples from recent days:

- Matt Young, $6.35 million from Boston for three years. Young was 8-18 last season for Seattle, is 51-78 lifetime and has a history of elbow problems. What apparently made this otherwise undistinguished 32-year-old so attractive to the Red Sox is that most of the things the rest of the world does right-handed, he can do with his left.

- Kevin Gross, $6.4 million from Los Angeles for three years. Gross was 9-12 with a 4.67 earned run average for Montreal last season, bad enough in stretches to get banished to the bullpen. He is 80-90 lifetime. What attracted the Dodgers to this 29-year-old is open to speculation; he isn’t even a lefty.

- Dan Schatzeder, $700,000 from Kansas City for one year. Schatzeder was 1-3 with no saves pitching for Houston and the New York Mets last season. He is 69-68 lifetime, a particularly appropriate description in this case, since Schatzeder is already 36. Now, $700,000 is admittedly a long way from $2 million, but middle-reliever Schatzeder is further than most from being a full-time pitcher. He totaled just 69.2 innings in 51 appearances last year.

Viewed by themselves, each of these signings could be written off as just another reminder that some ballplayers (what else is new?) are being overpaid.

But lump them together--and add the San Francisco Giants’ signing a week earlier of 33-year-old Bud Black, 13-11 with Cleveland and Toronto last season, 83-82 lifetime--and you arrive at a sum much greater than its parts.

The equation, if there were one, would read something like this: thirtysomething pitchers with .500 records equals $2 million.

What makes it dangerous to baseball is that few of the owners appear to have figured it out. Owner Charles Bronfman did, figuring it was better to run out of patience before he ran out of money.

“Much of the time has been joyous,” Bronfman, who is awaiting final approval to sell the Montreal Expos, said in an open letter to fellow owners Tuesday. “I feel that baseball and I have relished each other to the full. That is until the last few years . . .

“The financial enticement to win is so strong that we all roll the dice every year to the benefit, at the end of the day, of very few indeed.”

“I’ll admit it’s hard to believe what’s happening,” Cubs Manager Don Zimmer said. “People say, ‘What kind of a dummy would pay that much for so-and-so?’ But now, if one guy won’t pay it, the next guy will.”