1. Anthony Rendon, third baseman, Los Angeles Angels
Rendon is one of three 2019 Nats – Strasburg and Corbin being the others – who cashed in on the team’s 2019 World Series success to sign prodigious new deals they have prodigiously failed to deliver on.
It’s as if the Nats’ 2019 team is hexed. If anything happens to Juan Soto, we’ll know for sure.
In Rendon’s case, the reward of that championship was a $245 million deal with the Angels through 2026. The Angels paid Rendon all that money to play third base for them, but he has done precious little of that, appearing in just 200 of his team’s 546 games since the deal was done.
At various times of his LA excursion Rendon has been on the injured list with: a groin strain, a knee contusion, a hamstring strain, a hip impingement, wrist inflammation, wrist surgery, another groin strain, another wrist injury and – most recently – a shin contusion.
He’s never played in more than 58 games a season for the Angels, and this year the shin injury has him idled at 43. But it’s not like the Angels are missing a big bat; when he has played Rendon has hit .236 with two homers and a puny .318 slugging average. Those numbers are a far cry from his .319 average, 34 home runs, 126 RBIs and 1.010 OPS for the Nats in 2019.
At least Rendon does have a positive WAR…barely. He’s at 0.1, which measured against the positional norms puts his on=field value to the Angels at $772,000. That’s basically the league minimum. The problem is that $38.571 million salary. Subtract the one from the other and it happens that Anthony Rendon is being overpaid by $37.779 million in 2023.
And his contract still has three more years of life left in it.