When the Tigers opened a four-game series with the Royals Monday night, Javier Baez wasn't in the lineup. The team's $140 million shortstop was on the bench, with a .575 OPS that ranks second to last out of 150 qualifying MLB hitters.
If Baez's first season in Detroit was bad, his second has been worse -- and he has four years and $98 million remaining on his contract. To which Valenti asks, "What the F am I supposed to do with this guy?"
"They've been moving Javy Baez down in the order, but this man is dollar for dollar the worst player in all of baseball. If I let you draft a team and the salaries mattered, Javy Baez would be the last kid picked in gym class, for dodgeball. It kills me. As we sit here now two weeks from the trade deadline, what do you do with Javy Baez? Because the one thing I cannot accept is playing him everyday, unless he's batting ninth."
Rico says the Tigers are "stuck with him," unless you're willing to say, "We're just gonna Allen Iverson him. We're gonna pay him, but he's just not gonna play. We're gonna fulfill his contract but we can't win with him. That's one option. The other, he plays every day and they just hope that he comes out of his slump."
Of course, this is more than a slump for Baez. More than 200 games into his Tigers career, this might just be the player he is, which is "why I didn't want him here" in the first place, says Valenti. "He's done nothing in his two years here for me to give him any respect."
"Here's what you could do," says Valenti. "And I'm not saying do this. You could DFA him. He'll clear waivers, nobody will touch him and Javy will probably elect to be a free agent and sit at home and collect his money, versus showing up to the ballpark. If you do an allocation of resources, you got all these team-control, dirt cheap players, is there a way you could cost-average this that the sum of those several assets making nothing eat up the value of a $20 million player? You could approach it that way, but I don't have any faith your ownership will do that."
Rico says that "it comes to the point where you gotta take the hit: 'We're just going to sacrifice this money, rather than having to pay a bunch of money later. Let's go find somebody who can do this thing right.'"
What's more, Valenti says he doesn't want Baez "around these young players and I don't want to hear Scott Harris tell me how hard this guy works, because it's not working."
"It's the equivalent of chopping down a tree with a toothpick. Doesn't matter how long you stand there and how hard you're swinging that thing, it's a toothpick. It's not working. The guy sucked last year and he's worse this year. He is the single worst player in baseball, period. If there was an MLB Draft and his salary mattered, teams would take a dead person over Baez. So I need to know what we're going to do."
As for the idea of trading him, good luck. Even if the Tigers offered to attach a prospect or a player to Baez, "no one is paying that contract," says Valenti:
"If Scott Harris were able to trade this guy, you could take down Gehringer's statue and put one up of Scott Harris. You could put Scott Harris next to Ernie. There's no scenario. What do we do? Would I sit him this week in Kansas City? I would. He wouldn't play a single game. I just can't look at him, I can't do it. You want to try to trade him? You'd have to explain how that gets done. You want to DFA him? Ownership isn't going to pay that money out.
"So I don't know what to do with him. It goes way beyond not being playable. You could go to the minor leagues, pick any guy at random on a giant Price is Right board and they wouldn't be this bad."
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