Prince Fielder Signing A Surprise

Raise your hand if you saw this one coming. Prince Fielder to the Detroit Tigers. The surprise being not so much the destination but the apparent terms of the deal. Nine years and $214 million is a commitment at least as serious as til death do us part.

Just when you thought you couldn’t apply the word outrageous to any Major League Baseball deal, along comes the Prince. We pretty much saw him agreeing to a package with either the Texas Rangers or the Washington Nationals and I don’t recall the Tigers being on the radar screen, at least as more than a dot, not the size of another planet.

Clearly, the loss of catcher and reliable hitter Victor Martinez indefinitely to a knee injury diminished the defending American League Central Division champs’ prospects for the 2012 season. This signing is a dramatic and urgent reaction to the bad luck of Martinez’s health problem. Martinez may not play at all this coming season and with him out the Tigers went from division favorite to questionmark.

Now they are the favorites again, although they could still use another catcher. Last year the Tigers had the one-two batting punch of Miguel Cabrera and Martinez rolling for them. Now they will have the one-two punch of Cabrera and Fielder. They play the same position, first base, but will likely share that spot and the designated hitter role. Fielder is coming from the National League’s Milwaukee Brewers where he was an everyday player at first, but how much each slugger spends time in the field will be up to manager Jim Leyland.

When the free agency period began it was obvious that the No. 1 available player was Albert Pujols, who departed the St. Louis Cardinals for the Los Angeles Angels. Fielder was No. 2 as the hot guy to grab and it took much longer. It was difficult to picture him getting such a rich contract for such a long period of time, but he and his agent, Scott Boras, waited everyone out. The average seasonal payment will be $23.8 millon a year.

Given that Fielder will be 37 when the contract expires, this may well be the last time in his career that he is asked to afix his John Hancock to such a piece of paper. It also makes one wonder how much return the Tigers will be getting from Fielder for those kinds of bucks when he is in his mid-30s. You try to trade a guy who is 36 and owed $24 mil.

But that is way in the future. Right now the Tigers, who won 96 games last year, will look at the Fielder signing as a success for 2012 if they repeat as division champ and get into the playoffs. As we all know, once a team is in the post-season mix, whether it is as a wild card or title-holder, anything can happen.

Fielder is a lifetime .282 hitter, a three-time All-Star, who has hit more than 50 home runs in a season. One of the biggest whispered worries (and sometimes louder than that) about him concerns his body type. He is a very large man and he looks like the slightest slip in his diet could turn his wardrobe into all XXXX-sized garments. There is nothing much a team can do about that except assume that Fielder doesn’t want to wreck his career by eating too many Twinkies. At the moment that seems unlikely since he is a vegetarian and he should have something to prove moving to a new league with a colossal contract.

As far as filling a need goes, Fielder would have been a perfect fit with the Texas Rangers or some other teams, as well. In Detroit, he can be the man who puts the Tigers over the top in their quest for a World Series title. How much is that worth to Tigers’ management? We just found out.