Why would a team like the Red Sox pass on Dunn at this price.He would be insurance for Ortiz,Lowell,&Drew.At 4mill he could turn out to be a huge bargain.

... but is Manny 5x the draw?

... but is Manny 5x the headache?

Of course Manny isn't five times better. For that matter, Abreu isn't five times better than a couple of guys making $1M/yr.

Both of them, however are five times rarer (or more) than those other guys. Abreu is a fine ballplayer, someone who could do it all at his peak but whose tools are slowly eroding. Manny is a first-ballot HoF player coming off an astounding late-season run.

If you're the Angels, Abreu for $5M is simultaneously a bargain and not a useful improvement. (Losing Tex and having their outfield grow older is a bigger hit to their offense than most people seem to think.) Ramirez for $25M is no bargain and comes with considerable risk, but is the kind of improvement that the Angels need. Viewed in that light Manny is worth 5x what they'll pay Abreu.

Looking at the Tigers, on the other hand, Abreu at $5M would be a bargain and a useful improvement (since he pushes the overdone Gary Sheffield to the bench and allows the better defender between himself and Carlos Guillen to take the field). Ramirez would improve them still further, but perhaps not enough to be worth 5x that salary. (As a Tigers fan, I'd love to see them sign Dunn or Ramirez and eat the last year of Sheffield's contract, but that's a very bitter pill for a team whose fan base has 40% of the disposable income they had last year.)

Put another way, you can field a replacement-level team and win about 40 games. If you upgrade to an average team (via free agency), you'll pay about $80M more for 40 more wins (yet those guys are clearly not 20x better than the previous team). Upgrading to a championship team could cost you another $80M (via free agency), for just 15 wins this time. The marginal cost of improvement is low when you start at a bad place, and gets higher as you get better.

Baseball talent is the far, far right side of a bell curve, and it seems clear that most people, even today, don't grok the implications of that.

I wonder if the Braves even talked to Abreu at all. At that price he would have been worth it. I've heard that they were waiting for the market to come down, but at some point they had to make an offer, otherwise why wait? Perhaps they'll inquire about Adam Dunn now, or maybe they're happy with what they've got. The latter would seem strange to me.

Boston already has a BL DH.