Blast from the Past: Bengie Molina Retires

Bengie Molina announced his retirement a few days ago. He had pretty much kept that bit of news to himself, but his wife had other ideas and planned a surprise party for him at their house in Arizona. My first thought when reading that was she did it to ensure Bengie doesn't change his mind, but I'll leave that between them.

The party was well attended by present and former players well represented by the Giants. Whatever we, as fans, think of Bengie and his catching abilities, Giants pitchers, not an easy bunch to catch or please, love pitching to him. So much so that if you want blame somebody for delaying Buster Posey's arrival in the majors, Giants pitchers probably have as much to do with it as anybody. Of course, they are just as protective of Buster now, but yeah, pitchers can be a funny bunch sometimes.

Bengie has a few obstacles to overcome in jockeying for position in the pantheon of Giants history. To begin with, he started his career with the Angels and was a member of the team that beat the Giants in the 2002 World Series. Secondly, he had the misfortune of coming on board with the Giants during the death throes of the Barry Bonds era and had the dubious and misplaces honor of emerging from the smoldering wreckage as his successor at cleanup hitter. Lastly, he was asked to hold the catcher position past the expiration date on his contract and career until the Giants deemed Buster Posey ready to handle the difficult and downright dangerous stuff the Giants pitching staff brought to the mound every game.

It was fairly easy for Giants fans to forgive his Angels history when he quickly brought stability to a position that had been manned by the likes of Eliezer Alfonso and Todd Greene the season before. Bengie gave Barry Bonds a bit of protection in the lineup and came up with enough big hits to earn the nickname Big Money. As the Barry Era drew to a close and no replacement for the big guy was forthcoming, the fans started to blame Bengie for being an obviously inadequate cleanup hitter. Later, as the first glow of the Buster Posey era started to dawn on the horizon, Bengie got blamed for holding back the arrival of The Chosen One. He didn't help himself with the fans by seeming to be less than enthused about the prospect of mentoring the young star. Nevermind that the Giants were waiting for a green light from the guy many of them wished was the Giants manager instead of Bruce Bochy, Steve Decker.

I'm going to leave the discusssion of Bengie's career with one thought. He might be one of the most underrated players in the recent history of the game. Now, the term "underrated" is thrown around way too much and is often impossible to prove or disprove. It's an opinion, a judgement call in most cases. With the emergence of advanced valuation systems, we can get pretty good objective estimates of player values in terms of the salary structure of Major League Baseball. Bengie Molina earned a total of just over $33 million over the course of his career. Now, that's a ridiculous amount of money, but we can objectively show that it was also a ridiculously low amount of compensation compared to other players in the game at the same time.

When you compress Bengie's statistics into a single value that estimates how much he contributed to his team, Win Above Replacement(WAR), he put up a total of 15.2 WAR over his career. Players on the open market in major league baseball get paid, on average, $4.5-5 M per WAR which means that Bengie was paid for less than half his market value over the course of his career. Even after you account for salary inflation, he outproduced his salary in all but 2 of the 10 peak seasons of his career. The biggest disparity was his 2008 season with the Giants when his 2.7 WAR was worth $12.4 M while his salary was $6.3 M.

As time goes on, I hope Bengie Molina will be remembered by Giants fans as a good Giant. As much as he gave to the team, it is unfortunate, though necessary, that he had to watch the Giants win it all from the opposing dugout. I'm glad he finally was presented with his Giants WS ring at his retirement party. It was well deserved.