Too Human Is Eyre

OK, maybe the Cubs had good reason to make Scott Eyre their $11 million addition. Perhaps:

• they looked at Eyre's 2005 stats and chose to ignore the small sample size of, say, the rest of his career
  
• they felt that at 34, a pitcher is just approaching his prime
  
• they were sick of overworking their pitchers until their arms fall off and were relieved to get someone whose arm will fall off because someone else overworked him
  
• they realized that to win in baseball you need to start with a middle reliever and then build from there

Fine, perhaps they're just stupid to pay "top closer" money for a decent but aging middle reliever who has spent the last two seasons being heavily overworked. But what irritates me is that every off-season, when a team makes an early move to overpay a mediocre player--we'll call this "the Jaret Wright syndrome" for now--you hear about how this will inflate the market for the rest of the free agent signings.

WHY??? Is it collusion for 29 teams to say, "Hmm, the Cubs just way overpaid for a free agent. That's not `going rate,' though; lucky for Scott Eyre"? No, it's common sense. Just because the Yankees throw insane wads of cash at an injured underachiever, suddenly that establishes the standard for what injured underachievers can expect to be offered by everyone? Has the world gone completely mad? Wait, please don't answer that.