Howard is a fantastic player, but I still do think he’s overpaid. They chose to analyze the contract using RBI’s, which can be a very misleading stat. Howard is definitely overpaid, but I think it’s because of his lowly batting average and high percentage of strikeouts.

And that’s where I think things fall with the Phillies and Howard. They clearly feel he provides more than just the value on the field. So while his WARP3 may decline in the next five or six years, the team has to feel he provides a different kind of value that, perhaps, you can’t actually measure with advanced stats. David Montgomery, President and CEO of the Phillies, told 610WIP this week that, “The key for a player of Ryan’s stature is the length of the contract. This is a statement to our fans and everyone who follows us that you know who the first basemen is going to be for the next five, or hopefully six years.”

Interesting Take on this very subject

Everyone complains about the length and price of Sori’s deal too. However IF you knew the only way to win two division championships was to pay this much money would you have? Ryan Howard has led them to two World Series and as this blogger notes is an icon in the city … does this have value? Overpaying now may allow coffers to stay full to pay others later.

It’s tough to predict, but given his exceptional achievements and popularity in Philly, I can see why he got this contract.

Not a great contract, but what are you going to do? If they had not paid him the money, he would have gotten it somewhere else on the open market. He’s the face of the franchise. It’s not Roy Halladay, it’s Ryan Howard. Three years from now, they will probably be counting the days until this contract is off the books, and the Philly fans will be crucifying them for making this deal. And yet, the fans would have crucified them now if they hadn’t. Either way, the organization always loses with contracts like this.

“Howard’s game personifies what Bill James, the father of modern statistical analysis in baseball, once called "old player’s skills," namely patience and power. By contrast, young players tend to excel in speed, fielding and making contact.

Neither set of abilities is more valuable than the other. But they bode very differently for the futures of the players who possess them. Natural athletes like Carl Crawford or Hanley Ramirez can compensate for the inevitable loss of durability and bat and foot speed that comes with aging by improving their pitch recognition or bulking up in the weight room. But massive mashers like Howard or Prince Fielder cannot transform themselves into lithe leadoff men as the years go on and the strikeouts pile up. "

This implies that players with “old man’s skills” are more likely to decline when most sabermetricians claim the opposite. One of the main premises of advance stats is that plate discipline and power don’t decline with age nearly as much as speed and athleticism do. One of the other main ideas, highlighted in Moneyball, is the theory that plate discipline is something that cannot be taught, but is more or less innate. This author of this article did a piss-poor job of researching the topic at hand.

Shortly after the deal was announced, Philadelphia’s general manager, Ruben Amaro Jr., said Howard "kind of set the market for himself." When a general manager admits he has let players set their own market, it may be time to get into the market for a new general manager.

I think this singing is 10X worse than anything Hendry has put together. Why do such a long term expensive contract on a guy 2 years before his contract expires is beyond me. Especially when his current contract runs out when he is 32 and now they have him locked up FOREVER…way to go phillies – will make it easier to win the NL come 2014-2016.