Is this any way to run a team?

Les Carpenter's article on Cristian Guzman got us to thinking about Guzman's salary, which got us to thinking about the team's salaries, which go us to thinking about Jim Bowden's ability to allocate capital, which got us to thinking about, well, we'd rather stop here. Anyway, we'll address some of the long term issues in a later post. For the moment, let's focus on this year. Via ESPN, here are the salaries of the Nationals' players currently under contract:

1	Preston Wilson	$12,500,000
2	Livan Hernandez	$8,000,000
3	Jose Vidro	$7,000,000
4	Cristian Guzman	$4,200,000
5	Mike Stanton	$4,000,000
6	Jose Guillen	$3,500,000
7	Brad Wilkerson	$3,050,000
8	Vinny Castilla	$3,000,000
9	Esteban Loaiza	$2,900,000
10	Tony Armas	$2,260,000
11	Junior Spivey	$2,125,000
12	Brian Schneider	$2,000,000
13	Nick Johnson	$1,450,000
14	Joey Eischen	$1,040,000
15	Antonio Osuna	$800,000
16	Gary Bennett	$750,000
17	T.J. Tucker	$657,000
18	Ryan Drese	$550,000
19	Luis Ayala	$363,000
20	Chad Cordero	$346,500
21	Terrmel Sledge	$345,000
22	Jamey Carroll	$335,000
23	Alex Escobar	$326,000
24	John Patterson	$322,500
25	Francis Beltran	$318,500
26	Ryan Church	$316,000
27	Tony Blanco	$316,000
	Total	$48,581,500

A few things are obvious from this list. First, the Nationals are spending their money recklessly. Let's assume that the Nationals are paying the league minimum to Stanton and $2 million to Wilson. That means the Nationals are spending about $18 million on only four players from whom they are getting league average performance or worse. A smarter team could have purchased the same level of performance for a fraction of that cost and then spent the money on players who were likely to perform well above the league average now and in the future.

Second, Chad Cordero and John Patterson are among the most valuable players in baseball. There aren't a lot of top-of-the-line players making the league minimum, but the Nationals have two of them on their pitching staff. Getting that performance for such little money gave the Nationals a great opportunity to get superior returns while still spending the same amount of money as other teams. In other words, assuming that the Nationals got similar returns on their big contracts as most other teams, the Nationals would have been in a better position because of players like Cordero and Patterson. Instead, the Nationals wasted the opportunity by allocating their big contracts on players like Cristian Guzman, Preston Wilson, and Vinny Castilla. We think that's referred to as "throwing money down a rat hole."

Perhaps next year we'll have a General Manager who is much better than Bowden at allocating capital.