Mike Hampton calls it a career after 16 seasons in the Majors. This guy made a lot of money and used a lot of sick and vacation time. He had a good span during the late '90s and wasn't too shabby with a bat for a pitcher either. In 2000, he signed a monster deal with the Colorado Rockies which was an eight-year, $123.8MM contract. The Braves later traded for him after the 2002 season (no clue why) and ended up paying for the majority of his contract.
In fact, here is the exact transactions (baseball-reference):
- November 16, 2002: Traded by the Colorado Rockies with Juan Pierre and cash to the Florida Marlins for Vic Darensbourg, Charles Johnson, Pablo Ozuna and Preston Wilson.
- November 18, 2002: Traded by the Florida Marlins with cash to the Atlanta Braves for Ryan Baker (minors) and Tim Spooneybarger.
He had a decent first year with the Braves in 2003 and then absolutely stunk up the joint from then on. He was injured for most of his time from 2005 till 2008. Since baseball contracts are guaranteed, he made made about $29,000,000 for missing all of 2006 and 2007! Good thing a so called "insurance policy" paid for a good portion of this.
According to baseball-reference, this guy made approximately $125,000,000 for his career. He had 2,268 innings pitched in his career, so I did a little math fun and divided his total earnings by his total innings. That comes to earning a little more than $50,000 per inning pitched.
In comparison, Greg Maddux (former Brave), who will most likely be a first ballot Hall of Famer and is regarded by many as one of the best pitchers to ever play the game (top 10), made approximately $154,000,000 for his career. He pitched 5,008.1 innings with considerably better numbers. It's almost like an insult to even compare Hampton to this legend. Divide his earnings by innings, and Maddux made about $30,750 per inning.
Hampton made out quite nicely, or rather he was vastly overpaid according to his performances.
Good Riddance!
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