The Biggest Contract A's Owner John Fisher Has Handed Out
It's the off-season, which means money is flying everywhere at big ticket free agents. Heck, two teams have agreed to terms with Carlos Correa this winter! But spending hasn't been part of the A's M.O. since John Fisher, Lew Wolff, and co. took over ownership of the club in 2005.
Long gone are the days when the Philadelphia A's spent $100,000 on their infield, back when that was a good amount of money. This ownership group would love to pay $100,000 for a group of Hall of Fame infielders, but that is well below today's league minimum for one player.
The biggest contract given out in A's franchise history was to former third baseman Eric Chavez, who signed in 2004 for six years and $66M. By today's standards, that's roughly a $94M contract. While Fisher and company ended up paying for most of that deal, they were not the group that agreed to that contract beforehand. They took control of the A's in 2005.
This got me to wondering what the biggest contract handed out over the last 17 years has been, because I honestly didn't know. So I did some digging, and this is what I found.
Jason Kendall made a decent amount in his time with the A's ($34,922,077 to be exact), but he was acquired from the Pittsburgh Pirates ahead of the 2005 season after completing three years of his then-franchise record six year, $60M deal with the Buckos.
Mark Kotsay, the A's current manager, signed a three year, $16M deal with the A's as a player, and that deal is up there just to give you a sense of how this is going to go.
The highest paid player in the Fisher-era has been Coco Crisp, who played with the club from 2010 until he was traded at the 2016 Trade Deadline. In that span, he signed a couple of different contracts, totaling $53.25M. His numbers may not indicate the impact that he had on those 2012-2014 playoff teams, but anyone who was watching the A's during those runs knows that he was the engine of that offense.
But Crisp doesn't count since those were separate contracts that he signed.
There are also two players that were acquired via trade that make this list of notable contracts paid by the A's, but they didn't in fact sign with the club. The first one is pretty obvious, and that was Jed Lowrie.
Lowrie made a total of $30M in his time with the A's, even though the only contracts he signed with the A's were for $1.5M in 2021, and $850,000 in 2022. The Houston Astros traded Jed to the A's twice, with the first time still being within his first six seasons of service time. The second time, he had signed a three year, $23M deal with Houston, only to be traded back to Oakland after one season.
He then left the A's when that deal was up to spend two years on the Mets' IL before coming back to the green and gold for 2021 and then re-signed as a veteran presence for the '22 squad.
The other player that was signed and then traded to the A's was Stephen Piscotty, who had a six year, $33M contract with the St. Louis Cardinals when he was acquired. This deal was a special one because the two teams came together to work out a trade to get Piscotty closer to his ailing mother, and A's fans will always have a soft spot for the Piscotty family.
The third-richest contract handed out during the John Fisher era was to Billy Butler after the 2014 season. His highlight in his time with the A's was getting punched by Danny Valencia. Oakland signed him for three years and $30M for that memory. He was roughly league average for the A's, but was released by the team in September of 2016 with a year remaining on his deal because the team was ready for a change. He played in 12 games with the Yankees at the end of the '16 season before calling it a career.
The final two guys to get big dollars from John Fisher are Yoenis Céspedes and Khris Davis, but there isn't a clear cut winner here. I'll explain, but first, the numbers.
Céspedes signed with the A's out of Cuba before the 2012 season for four years and $32M. He took the A's from a rebuild to one of the best seasons many A's fans can remember in his rookie year, and was helping lead the team to the best record in baseball in 2014 before he was traded to the Boston Red Sox for Jon Lester (and Jonny Gomes).
Khris Davis was signed to a two year extension for a total of $33.5M for the 2020 and 2021 seasons. It's a short deal, but it's still the most expensive dollar amount that was agreed upon.
That said, there are a couple of caveats to the K.D. deal. The first, and probably the biggest, is that the 2020 campaign wasn't a full season because of Covid, so player's salaries were prorated. Davis' $16.75M salary was prorated to about $6.2M if my math is correct.
The other caveat here is that he was traded to the Texas Rangers before the 2021 season, and the Rangers paid that second year according to Baseball Reference.
So you could look at that and say, well it's obviously K.D., because that was the largest amount agreed to! But the A's also didn't pay him all of that money--or even half of that money. The same goes for Céspedes, who was traded before completing his contract. The A's paid roughly $22M of that deal to him.
With all of that in mind, the one player that signed with the A's and was paid all of the money owed to them was Billy Butler, even though he last just under two seasons with the club.
So when John Fisher says that once he gets his new ballpark that he's going to spend money like a top-10 owner, it's kind of hard to take him seriously. The front office would have to turn to long-term deals, which is something they haven't done. Coco Crisp signed some short-term, incentive laden deals, but even that was outside of the norm.
It's going to take a lot of change for John Fisher to actually start spending like he's promised the fan base he would, because it would take signing ten Billy Butlers (please don't) to land a marquee free agent these days.