Tony Tavares, Omar Minaya, & Peter Angelos: Enemies of the People

Our post on the very small numbers of young National League hitters in whom it would make sense to invest very large sums of money reminded us that the Nationals (i.e., the Expos) recently had a player who would have been on that list. He was one of the league's most feared hitters and excelled in almost every facet of the game. Here are his stats in 2002 and 2003:

Year	OBP	SLG	OPS	VORP
2002	.417	.593	1.010	86.6
2003	.426	.586	1.012	48.7

His VORP for 2003 was down, but only because he suffered an injury; his OPS continued to be among the best in baseball. What's more, at 27 he was in his prime and was likely to remain a dominant player for a long time. He was the kind of player that organizations build around, and he was one of the very few players in whom it made sense to invest a lot of money.

His name was Vladimir Guerrero. He was in the last year of his contract with the Expos in 2003, and the Expos had a chance to sign him to a long-term contract beginning with the 2004 season. The problem was that the Expos were owned by Major League Baseball. MLB had appointed team President Tony Tavares and General Manager Omar Minaya, but the team was really run by Bud Selig as a surrogate for the other 29 teams in the league.

Tavares, Minaya, and Selig were all saying the right things. Selig said that Tavares and Minaya could sign Guerrero if they thought that made sense for the team: "That's a decision that Frank [Robinson] and Omar and Tony have to make. I don't think anything precludes that." Selig stated flatly that Tavares would not need MLB's approval to sign Guerrero to a $15 million per year contract.

It was fine for Selig to say that, but as long as the Expos were owned by MLB it would be very difficult for the league to approve the Expos outbidding another team because that team was a part-owner of the Expos. The conflicts of interest were obvious, and there is no doubt that they undermined the team's efforts to sign one of the best players in the game.

The way out of those conflicts was to sell the team and move them to another city, and the obvious destination was Washington, D.C. But Peter Angelos refused to consent to a move to D.C. and was able to convince Selig that he could make life very difficult for the league if they tried. Selig's efforts to avoid identifying Angelos as the impediment were comical: "It isn't that easy. There are all kinds of stadium problems and ALL KINDS OF SITUATIONS" that forced baseball to postpone selling and moving the team. Right.

It was that delay that prevented the Expos from signing Guerrero. In Washington, the team has tens of millions more dollars to spend than it had in Montreal, and with that money it easily could have signed Guerrero to the contract he signed in Anaheim.

But even the delay should not have prevented Tavares and Minaya from signing Guerrero. You don't get the opportunity to sign a franchise player like that to a long-term contract very often. And missing an opportunity like that is a mistake that will have a long and lasting effect on a team.

Tavares and Minaya should have insisted on signing Guerrero and should have outbid the Angels, whose acquisition of Guerrero is one of the best signings in recent memory. If it was true that MLB would have permitted the Expos to sign Guerrero, they should have signed him. And if it wasn't true, Tavares and Minaya should have found out that it wasn't true. Why didn't they do that? Perhaps because they were thinking about future employment opportunities.