When owners of Major League Baseball teams give their general managers millions of dollars to spend on the free agent market, it’s kind of like giving money to a kid who wants candy. You tell them not to spend it all in one place, but know they’re going to do it anyway.
And that’s because the free agent market is a fickle mistress. Like any good gamble, one pull of the handle could send you home with your pockets weighed to the floor or broke like a joke.
The Philadelphia Phillies must know the feeling. The free agent market has changed since its inception. Teams no longer pay for past production. They pay for what a prospective free agent could do for them in the future. Nowadays, it’s easy to go broke.
But one fundamental aspect of the free agent market that has never changed is that it is incredibly easy for you to spend millions of dollars on a single player and not be guaranteed that he is going to produce at the highest level. Is that the way the cookie crumbles?
Some free agents are just “busts”—and for the sake of this slideshow—we will define a “bust” as a player who came to the city of Philadelphia with a certain level of expectations and did not perform up par. That’s it. There are no qualifiers other than that, but obviously, certain players are “busts” at different levels, so keep that in mind.
We will pick a free agent “bust” at every position that you would normally build a 25-man roster with and hope that history doesn’t repeat itself.