Over the weekend, I got to watch (again) the nauseating spectacle of Detroit Tigers firstbaseman Miguel Cabrera disgracing his own legacy as one of the greatest players of all time. A guaranteed first ballot Hall of Famer with over 3,000 hits and more than 500 career homers, Cabrera is no longer even a passable performer at age 40, and hasn’t been since 2017. That year and every year since, Cabrera has been paid an average of $30 million a season for production that the Tigers could have gotten from a mediocre minor league journeyman playing for the Major League minimum salary. All weekend, the TV broadcasters were blathering on about what a wonderful human being “Miggy” is. If he were really wonderful, he would have retired as soon as he realized he was stealing his salary and hurting his team in the process.

Cabrera has graciously announced that this will be his final season, as if he had any choice in the matter. His long term contract is up: he’s squeezed over $200 million out of it without having a single season worthy of his reputation or his salary. He has one (1) home run this season, with less than a third of the schedule to go. The year he signed his contract, he hit 44.

But Cabrera isn’t the subject of this post; I already complained about him and other greedy, fading players here. There’s a worse offender in baseball now, believe it or not. The current miscreant is St. Louis starting pitcher Adam Wainwright, who had announced before this season that it would be his last. [Wainwright, by the way, has one of the more varied and interesting Ethics Alarms dossiers among pro athletes.] He is 41, and not only are 40+-year-old pitchers who still belong in the Major Leagues rarer than star sapphires, Wainwright’s 2022 season at 40 was not a harbinger of optimism, though he still was getting batters out, albeit not as he once had. But Adam Wainwright has pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and only them for 17 years , winning just short of 200 games along the way. He is regarded as a hometown hero to Cardinal fans, who also wanted him aboard for one more campaign because they had reason to think their perennial play-off team had a real chance to get to the World Series again in 2023, and nothing is more valued on such teams as a grizzled old veteran who has been through the wars before.

It was a good theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Wainwright was done, through, cooked, out of pitches and excuses. This season his earned run average is almost 9 runs a game, which means he is pitching batting practice to the opposition. A starting pitcher without a long-term contract and with no reputation as a team legend is usually cut if he can’t keep his ERA below 6; under 4 runs a game is good, under 4.5 is considered acceptable. But 8.78, which is what Wainwright has delivered in 15 starts? A decent college pitcher could do that well, maybe a top high school pitcher too. And for this consistent failure, Adam Wainwright is being paid $17,500,000.

That’s great leadership, there, Adam: a fine lesson to teach the young players who have been told you know how to play the game “the right way.” The history of Major League Baseball is filled with players, great and near great, who retired mid-season when they realized that they due to injuries or advancing years they could not play up to their own standards. Lou Gehrig did it, of course; so did Hall of Famers Brooks Robinson, Mike Schmidt and Ryne Sandberg. True, none of them would have been leaving as much money on the table as Wainwright would be if he emulated them, but none of them had made a fraction of the money over their careers that Wainwright has: more than $184 million so far.

Wainwright should quit. There is no excuse for him not quitting, except that 1) he apparently wants the extra cash more than he cares about how he ends his career and 2) the Players Union hates hates hates it when players waive any portion of their contracts. Cardinals Manager Oli Marmol spoke to reporters yesterday about his pitcher giving up 15 earned runs in his last two starts over just a few innings. “Hopefully it goes well, and that we can keep going. If it doesn’t, we’ll sit down and we’ll have another honest conversation as to what does this really look like moving forward and what’s best? So he’s been great about it,” Marmol said.

He hasn’t been “great about it.” He’s still taking a lot of money under false pretenses, money the Cardinals, who have has a terrible year, could be spending on getting better players. Wainwright has been nice about it, and it’s easy to be pleasant when your employer pretends you’re a valuable asset when you’re really an anvil around its neck.