Posted by basebal5 on Thursday, April 17, 2008 at 3:09 am

It's never a good thing when you have to preface an article with a statement like: “Let me start out by saying I don't hate Barry Zito.” With that out of the way, let's get on with it.

Last year former Oakland A’s pitcher Barry Zito hit the free agent market. Not only did he hit the free agent market, he hit it over the head, chopped it up into little pieces, and lit it on fire. The San Francisco Giants offered Zito the largest contract for a pitcher in the history of baseball. The 7-year, $126 million contract set a new precedence in which starting pitchers will be paid.

As I stated in numerous articles at the time, I liked Barry Zito as a pitcher. Up to that point he had been a very solid starter and was very reliable. However, I also stated that over the four seasons leading up to the trade he had a combined record of 55-46. Granted he also had an ERA below 4.00 which is very attractive for a starter nowadays, but I also would have never put him in the upper echelon of pitchers at that point in his career as he was obviously starting on the downward swing.

For those of you who have read me for a while now know that I stated from day one that not only did the Giants make a HUGE mistake signing him to so many years, they also set off a chain reaction that will end up hurting every other team in Major League Baseball for years to come. This will particularly hurt teams that don’t have endless payrolls unlike the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, and Cubs. The Giants are now financially stuck with an $18 million contract per year for the next seven years to one pitcher who’s far from the best in baseball. Ouch.

Now I don't want to blame Zito for signing on the dotted line, I mean come on, that's a lot of money. And I don't want to get into the horrible state of the payrolls of baseball and how many teams are apparently playing with Monopoly money either. That subject makes my head hurt and I could write a book on it. My main point here is how badly the Giants have screwed themselves, and more importantly their fans, for quite a long time.

Think about it this way: the Giants are paying Zito $18 million per year averaged out. So essentially the Giants have paid just over $20 million thus far for a 11-17 record in 37 starts with 139 strikouts and an ERA a tick above 4.50. To me that doesn't sound like a good investment. That's a horrible investment. In fact, he's only going to get older and his skills are going to diminish even more. Poor Giants fans.

Basically a team that is as offensively thirsty as any team I have ever seen has no budget to go out and pay for it. Plus they have two young phenom pitchers, Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, who at some point are going to need to get paid.

What brought all this on? Today's performance by Zito was another blah performance. Sure he only gave up three runs and five hits over six innings against the Diamondbacks (the hottest offense in baseball), but he still gave up five walks and only struck out two in 105 pitches. Once again, not worth the over $545,000 he makes per start now.

Too bad I can't make that kind of money for being mediocre at my job.