LeBatard On Loria’s Largesse

Delgado makes the Marlins very, very good.

Best-in-the-league good.

Possible championship good.

But. . . .

Where did all this money come from?

And do all the departed champion Marlins — Pudge Rodriguez, Derrek Lee, Carl Pavano, Brad Penny — have a right to feel betrayed and hurt by the sudden appearance of it?

Because they actually helped win and hold up the trophy here.

And Delgado has never been in a playoff game.

And he gets the $52 million jackpot?

These are not criticisms, just questions. Repeat, in case you just read over it: not criticisms, just questions. Save all your flammable e-mail about the evil journalist raining all over the championship parade on what should and is a day of sports celebration.

Delgado is an exceptional, exciting signing that makes Florida immediately better than any team in the National League except the Cardinals. But the Marlins did something they never do here, getting into a bidding war that inflated an original and fair offer of $30 million to $52 million, pushing aside even a Mets team that has been spending sloppily all winter.

The Marlins, for example, could have kept Pudge and Lee for less than the $69 million they just gave their replacements (Delgado and Paul Lo Duca). In other words, they could have kept a defending champ almost completely intact. I wouldn’t have given a 30-plus catcher the $40 million Pudge wanted, not even after seeing the monster season he just had in Detroit, but it is fair to ask today if Delgado-Lo Duca makes you better today than the champion duo of Lee-Pudge. I think it does, but there’s room for debate there.

That $69 million could also have been used to lock up Penny, Pavano, Josh Beckett, Dontrelle Willis and A.J. Burnett for the next three or even four years if it had been offered, with vision, at the start of last season.

That’s risky, obviously.

Pavano hadn’t really done anything yet. The Marlins rightly fear injuries eating up salary, and Beckett, Burnett and Pavano all have a history of them while Penny is always in the kind of shape that lures them. But if you had your starting staff locked up, you don’t have to fear 2006 the way you do now, when Burnett and Al Leiter will be gone, and the only remaining starter from any of the Marlins championships will be Beckett (Willis was a reliever in the 2003 postseason).

In other words, Florida could have locked up a champion pitching staff that beat Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa/Kerry Wood/Mark Prior and the Yankees — plus Burnett. But it opted instead to give that money to Delgado even though the mathematics show that, whether it is A-Rod in Texas or Delgado in Toronto, teams never do any winning when too high a payroll percentage is in the bank account of a single player.

We can go back and forth on whether pitching or hitting wins. Yankees-Red Sox were one-two in AL runs scored last season. Cards-Astros were one-five in NL.

Lack of hitting crippled the Marlins last September, so you need a Delgado. But the Marlins did win their championship on pitching while Brian Giles, an offensive player comparable to Delgado, has never done any winning and the Phillies have done nothing but underachieve since getting Thome.