Sheez, I post a fluff piece to pass off some research on the novelty of Damian Miller playing in Miller Park as an analysis of his career, and people actually hold me to it.

Well, I think the most interesting thing in the Miller signing is how it affects the A's. The Miller signing itself was somewhat ho-hum. I think my quickie analysis showed that Miller was one of the better catchers in baseball basically because of his defense as opposed to his just-average offense.

The one thing I did question was the wisdom of locking up a 35-year-old catcher for three years (though only two guaranteed). So how risky is that, in general?

Since Miller just turned 35 in October, I looked for all of the 34-year-old starting catchers in baseball history (minimum of 80 games behind the plate). Then I tried to determine how effective those catchers would be over the next three years. I averaged the games played and OPS for those players for any years that they were active. I prorated the total Win Shares over three years, even if the player was not active for those years. The reason for this was to determine the player's worth to his team over three years (ergo Win Shares), but the other stats totals only made sense as an average. (Note that Brent Mayne, who was 34 in 2002, and Brad Ausmus and Dan Wilson, who were 34 in 2003, are not penalized for the years that they have yet to play: their Win Shares are averaged over the years yet far that they have been active). Then I took the difference between their Win Share total in their 34th year and compared it to their 35-37 average. I ranked them by the difference:

Of the 64 catchers on the list, just 11 witnessed either an improvement or at least no decline in their Win Share total. A number were fairly recent players, so maybe the trend is becoming less pronounced, but most catchers declined by an average of 5 Win Shares (from 11 to 9 in year one—2 WS—, to 7 in year two—4 WS—, and then to 6 in year three).

More significantly, those catchers played an average of just 82 games, or 25 fewer than in their 34th year, and that ignores those player-years when the players were inactive/retired. If you add in those years, the players averaged just 73 games.

So is three mil a year a bit steep to pay for what amounts to a bad gamble? I would think so, at least for the Brewers where that would constitute about ten percent of their 2004 payroll. Even so, Miller will probably be a major upgrade over the Chad Moeller and Gary Bennett rotation that the Brewers employed last season. The more's the pity.