Free-agent success stories are more common in Major League Baseball than you might think, but teams know all too well that failures can and do happen.
There are plenty of examples from the last 20 years.
We've highlighted what we think is each team's worst free-agent signing since 2000. This naturally involved hunting for non-extension multiyear contracts that paid out big bucks—i.e., a minimum of $10 million—to players who didn't produce much on the field.
However, we didn't simply go looking for the largest disparity between dollars paid out and value generated. A methodology such as that would have pointed us in the direction of merely disappointing signings, whereas we were looking for total flops.