Felipe Lopez Will Wear the Red Bird

by
March 1, 2010

If Felipe Lopez earns the maximum payout on his 2010 player contract, he will earn roughly $2.2M from the Cardinals. Lopez was worth nearly 5 wins last season and roughly 3 wins in the three seasons prior to that. Alex Cora has 5.9 WAR since 2002 and he will earn at least $2M next season with the chance to earn $3M with certain incentives, or vest a 2011 option worth an additional $2M.

Besides the fact that life just isn’t fair at time, a few other factors played into Lopez’ pay being lower than Cora’s – even beyond Omar Minaya’s indiscretion in re-signing Cora instead of waiting out the middle-infielder market. Lopez carries with him questionable makeup that removed a few potential suitors and he’s coming off a career season in which he’s highly unlikely to repeat.

The Cardinals’ depth chart up the middle features Brendan Ryan (currently nursing a wrist injury), Julio Lugo, Skip Schumaker, Tyler Green, and minor league invitee Ruben Gotay. Assuming Schumaker can also fill the role of reserve outfielder, there’s a pretty good chance three of those players make the opening day roster with Lopez, with the clear advantages being held in that order. This gives the Cardinals some pretty nice depth, and also allows for an alternative at third base if David Freese is to slip up.

The finances of this deal are excellent for the Cardinals. If he never steps on the field, it’s a sunk cost at the price of a middle reliever. If he plays well, the most he can earn is the price of … well, a slightly better middle reliever. It’s a fail-safe commitment and one that comes on a wildly varying performer. Check his wOBA and plate appearance totals over the last three seasons:

2007: 671 PA, .295 wOBA
2008: 532 PA, .320 wOBA
2009: 680 PA, .356 wOBA

What he’ll do next season is anyone’s guess. CHONE and Marcel combine for a .326 average, which would be more than enough to justify this deal and would essentially equal his career total.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Good job by the opportunistic Cardinals.





 

10 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
flyerdog11
15 years ago

It’s Tyler Greene, with an e at the end. And yes, that matters, because Tyler Green with no terminal e is a different player, so your auto-linker is pointing to the wrong guy.

1
WY
15 years ago
Reply to  flyerdog11

Beat me to it.

0