Ellsbury Has Hip Surgery; Yankees Still Owe Him More Than $70 Million

Yankees (and former Red Sox) outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left hip on Monday, guaranteeing that he will not play a single inning in 2018.

Despite his inactivity, Ellsbury will still earn more than $21 million this year. That is more than the Yankees will pay to Didi Gregorius, Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, Dellin Betances, Aaron Hicks, Austin Romine, Greg Bird, Miguel Andujar, and Gleyber Torres combined.

Ellsbury is also guaranteed almost $70 million over the next three seasons ($21,142,857 per). After 2021, he will get another $5 million when the Yankees buy out his option rather than pay him another $21 million for 2022.

The Ellsbury Doughboy signed that 7/153 deal on December 3, 2013, shortly after winning his second World Series with the Red Sox. The Daily News gloated:

The ink on that contract wasn't dry for very long before some New York sportswriters were saying this was a horrible deal for the Yankees, an opinion shared by many fans on both sides of the rivalry.

Mike Lupica (Daily News) said it was "the kind of insane longterm contract that got [the Yankees] into the kind of fix they are in in the first place". Bill Madden (Daily News) admitted: "I'm just not sure what the Yankees are trying to prove here." He said the contract "will almost certainly be another financial disaster three or four years down the road".

As it turns out, the end of the 2018 season is "four years down the road". Madden's prediction was not particularly daring, though, because Ellsbury's deal was a sinkhole from the very start. If you look at his OPS+ numbers, the 2011 season was an extreme outlier. Excluding two seasons because of limited playing time (2007 (33 games) and 2010 (10 games)), these are his OPS+ numbers, with a / indicating when he changed teams:

88, 98, 146, 84, 113 / 111, 83, 88, 97

Ellsbury has been an above league-average hitter in only three of those eight seasons. He slugged .552 in 2011, but has never topped .426 in any other year. Similarly, both his average and on-base percentage in 2011 were 20 points higher than he has achieved in any other season.

Some more advanced stats show a huge drop in production:

        wRC+   RAA     WAA
2011    150     58     6.0
2013    112     33     3.8
 /
2014    109     10     1.3
2015     83      0     0.1
2016     91      5     0.6
2017    101      3     0.3

wRC+: Weighted Runs Created - quantifies a player's total offensive value and measures it by runs; park and league-adjusted (FanGraphs: "wRC+ is the most comprehensive rate statistic used to measure hitting performance because it takes into account the varying weights of each offensive action and then adjusts them for the park and league context in which they took place.")
RAA: Runs Above Average - # of runs better than a league average player
WAA: Wins Above Average - # of wins added above that of an average player
Rather than paying the major league minimum (or a little for that meager level of production, the Yankees have been shelling out more than $20 million a year. The Red Sox have not been sorry for a long time, if they ever were.