Brewers sign Capuano 1 year, $3.75 million

[MJLiverock]

I agree with what you are saying RoCo and I am not necessarily disagreeing with you Russ. I just wasn't that surprised they both came in the with similar salaries. Arby tends to value recent performance and doesn't seem to put a lot of weight on expected future performance. Both Cappy and Vargas had similar years and ended up with similar salaries with Cappy getting a little more. I didn't look at the new salaries as a function of how much of a raise each guy recieved, but rather where they ended up at based on the numbers each put up in the most recent year.

[dadofandrew]

Arby isn't set up to gauge future performance, only the past. That's why teams have the option to non-tender.

[Ennder]

Neither one when to arbitration anyway, they agreed on the deals. Granted I'm sure they had an idea of what they would get as do the Brewers but it could be something as simple as Capuano wasn't asking for much more than Vargas.

[monty57]

Until there's a fundamental change in the way the financial aspects of baseball work, this is never going to change. Guys will get paid based largely on what they did, not what they'll do.

 

Let's hope for the Brewers' sake there isn't a fundamental change any time soon. I doubt the Brewers could sign their top picks and field a competitive MLB team if the structure was similar to the NBA, where top players get monster contracts right off the bat. I find it hard to explain to "average fan" friends that baseball players are not that highly paid compared to players in other sports.

 

As for Cappy vs. Vargas, I'd much rather have Cappy on the team, but I'm not surprised that they're being paid similar amounts. For the most part, it seems that pitchers' contracts are based on wins, saves, stirkeouts and ERA. Position players are paid based on batting average, RBIs, home runs, BARISP and to a lesser extent defense (aka errors). "Stat guys" may think this is an archaic system, but good "stat guy" GMs can still use this to their advantage.