I’ve been critical of the Prince Fielder contract. So have the majority of my counterparts around the baseball blogosphere. It’s a lot of money for a guy who doesn’t fit ideally into that roster and it may cause some issues later, yadda, yadda yadda, etc.
But Tigers fans don’t really care. At least the ones who think like Kurt Mensching of Bless You Boys:
Mensching goes on to note that the Tigers have shown flexibility in the past, the willingness to make trades and the ability to buck the expectations of the smart set. One example: how the team was supposed to crater financially when the economic crisis hit a few years ago, yet have witnessed damn fine attendance and the ability to maintain high payrolls.
I’m not sure I’d be so rosy about it were I a Tigers fan, mostly because a lot of this hinges on unknowns like player health, what happens with guys like Justin Verlander, etc. But Mensching is probably right that a lot of us are worrying a bit too much now about things that might not happen later.
There are a lot of bad long-term deals out there (and Mensching fully admits that the Fielder deal may look pretty bad towards the end). But beyond the Cubs’ many awful deals, it’s not like all of them totally kneecap teams for a long period of time. Such deals can be total drags, but they’re not all complete and utter millstones.
And as Mensching also notes: in the long run, we’re all dead. So that’s cheery too.