I’d rather have Fielder and Grienke (available next year), which would cost little more than Pujols alone.

If by spending boatloads of money, you can get boatloads more to spend on your team not only when Pujols is aging and would potentially be a huge drain on the payroll in any other scenario, the team now has more money to spend to keep the team competitvie even when Pujols is 42 and making $30 million a year (they still pocket an extra 70 M that year they can spend to acquire new talent).

Now whether they actually do that or not is a different question, but it won’t be for a lack of money.

Now is every penny of that increase attributable to Pujols? Nope, there’s inflation and their WS win a fewyears back and other consideration as well, but I’d guess about 1/2 the increase is purely becuase they just got the best player in baseball. But the timing of the deals makes the relationship between the two obvious and there have been several articles in recent months from numerous sources that have covered the specifics. The long and short of that consensus is that, not only did the Angels sign Pujols for free, but they’re getting paid to have him on their team.

I readily admit if you look at just the specifics of that deal in a vacuum it looks miserable, but that’s not a horrific contract by any stretch when put in proper perspective. Every other team in baseball would love to be getting paid to employ Pujols.

http://pabaseball.blogspot.com/2011/12/philadelphia-phillies-2012-roster.html

That includes Howard, but they have a few other players to take his place once he’s placed on the DL. Probably Posednik, Orr, or Martinez.

No one’s crazy enough to commit that type of new money into a team in one year, but you can (and you should) expect them to continue to be active in FA and trades in the coming years to address actually legitimate needs.

@uyf1950. I think the Phillies are pretty much done with their roster management (at least major major moves). Depending on what site you look at you’ll find 20-25 players listed. Cot’s give you a pretty good idea on what it looks like.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tSSu2Qy8G9pTSsguHAbeu-A&output=html

Of course a good number of those players won’t make the roster but still.

This has been mentioned about 1000000000 times since the signing. I don’t understand how hard this is to understand. If any other team made that signing it’d have been idiotic, but given the situation the Angels were in, it was pure genius.