In free agency, the winning team is usually the one that spends the least. Over the last five years, the two best free agent contracts were, between them, worth less than $2 million. One was the $1.25 million deal David Ortiz signed with Boston in January 2003, and the other was the $500,000 contract Chris Carpenter signed with St. Louis in December 2002. Ortiz looked like a solid bench hitter, and Carpenter was recovering from a shoulder injury that could have ended his career. Obviously, neither team knew what they were getting when they signed those deals — but that’s just why they were so good. The very best signings always involve far more luck than design.

We haven’t yet reached that point in the offseason where teams begin to release marginal players for which they have no use, which means no one can go scavenging for true bargains yet. The general principle still applies, though: Even at the higher reaches of the market, the best deals almost always involve players who seem to have something wrong with them. The Los Angeles Angels were able to sign Vladimir Guerrero to a bargain $75 million contract because there were overblown concerns about a back injury he’d suffered. Florida was able to sign Ivan Rodriguez for $10 million for the same reason. By this logic, the sketchier characters loitering around the bazaar right now start to look like the more appealing. Take Andruw Jones. The 30-year-old centerfielder and longtime member of the Atlanta Braves is generally regarded — coming off a season in which he hit .222 — as one of the biggest disappointments in baseball. At 19, he started the season in A-ball, hit .339 AVG/.418 OBA/.652 SLG across three levels, and hit .400 in the World Series, while showing off defense no one had bettered since Willie Mays’s prime. He was compared to Ken Griffey Jr. and Mickey Mantle.

No one could possibly live up to that kind of advance notice, and Jones hasn’t. In 2000, at 23, he hit .303/.366/.541, with otherworldly defense. He’s never bettered any of those numbers, not even in a season in which he hit 51 home runs, and his defense has declined from otherworldly to merely good. He’s also gained enough weight to make his listed weight of 170 pounds comical. With a notoriously nonchalant style in the field, and an outright lethargic approach at the plate, he’s earned himself a reputation as a lazy and somewhat thoughtless player.

Here, though, you just see the curse of expectations. At 30, Jones ranks fifth all time in career home runs among centerfielders with 368. From his debut well into his 20s, he has been regarded as a historically good defensive player. This is the resume of a future Hall of Famer. But because Jones peaked early and because he’s not only coming out of a bad season, but one that magnified his principal flaws — his low batting average and his inability or unwillingness to refine his approach at the plate — he’s regarded as a dangerous proposition, rather than an excellent player still in his prime.

Players vary from year to year, but Andruw Jones is one of the more consistent around. From 2001 to 2006, he hit between .251 and .277 and, with the exception of one year, hit between 29 and 41 home runs. The one unusual occurrence is that he would walk in some years and not walk in others; his on-base averages ranged from .312 to .366. This past season he hit .222. He could as easily have hit .300, and it would have been no more telling about what kind of player he is than the accumulated weight of all those years. We know exactly what kind of player he is, though, and he isn’t a .222 hitter. He’s a .260 hitter with 35-home run power and very good defense in centerfield — basically Carlos Beltran with less speed and less power to hit doubles.

That makes Jones a very good player — a star in fact — and also a potential steal. A team could likely sign him to either a one-year make-good contract, in which they’d most likely be getting performance comparable to Beltran’s for two-thirds the salary; or a longer deal that would lock him in for several years at a price somewhat lower than that while avoiding the dangerous years past 35, when aging players are most likely to just fall off a cliff. Why? Because Jones performed badly on a fluke, because he has a bad reputation, and because there is a glut of superficially similar but lesser players such as Aaron Rowand, Torii Hunter, and Mike Cameron on the market. It’s a perfect confluence that obscures his worth.

Talent tells, though. And it’s Jones, not any of these players, who still has the talent that made him not only a prodigy, but one of the most accomplished players of his generation — and who is still just 30 years old. It’s rarely clear, when it comes to free agency, that you can even get what you pay for. Jones is as close as a team can come to being sure of getting more.

tmarchman@nysun.com