Few things put more pressure on a ballclub than arbitration, which is always a winning situation for a player and almost always a losing one for a club. This is because of the nature of the process.

The player and the club each submit a number to an impartial arbitrator, who may or may not know much about baseball and has to choose one or the other number. The club has to denigrate the player. (“Shlabotnik may have hit 32 home runs – but how many game winning RBI did he have? Less than four-fifths as many as the average cleanup hitter!”)

The player’s agent has to inflate his accomplishments. (“How many game winning RBI did Albert Pujols have in night games on the road in games where the prevailing winds were coming in from the northwest while playing for the Royals? None! Shlabotnik is twice the player, and deserves twice the money.”) All of this leads to dishonest arguments and bad feelings.

Then there are the guidelines governing which peers a player may be compared with. A player in his first year of eligibility can generally only be compared to players of similar accomplishments, unless he has done special things, like win the MVP award. While this works to artificially depress salaries, it can also lead to rapid inflation – once one player in a particular class gets paid, so do all the rest.

And finally, perhaps causing the most agita for baseball executives, is the agonizing choice of whether or not to offer arbitration at all. Say you have a fat, injury-prone designated hitter who can’t hit lefties, who made a million dollars the previous season and is due for a big raise despite all his flaws. Do you take him to arbitration and gamble he’ll fulfill his potential, or cut him loose and spend the cash elsewhere? It’s not an easy decision; sometimes, that fat DH becomes David Ortiz, whom the Twins let loose after the 2002 season rather than face arbitration.

With arbitration season coming up, this week has seen a lot of teams cutting deals with eligible players. Most of them illustrate why antacid makers take their biggest profits from frazzled GMs this time of year.

Take the Reds’ deal with disappointing outfielder Austin Kearns. In his rookie season four years ago, he hit .315 BA/.407 OBA/.500 SLG, numbers in line with his minor league performance that seemed to augur stardom. In the three years since, he’s averaged 86 games per season and hit .245. Stardom is probably not in the offing. Nonetheless, the Reds felt compelled to shell out $1.85 million to him, so as not to watch him become Al Kaline in someone else’s outfield. It’s an amount that will bring smiles to the face of every agent representing a disappointing pseudo-scrub who was once thought to be a future All-Star.

Much the same is true of Carlos Pena’s new deal. The once-touted first baseman, who’s played for Detroit for years without giving any evidence of why he was once thought to be the best hitting prospect in baseball, earned a raise to $2.8 million after a season in which he lost his job and ended up playing in only 79 games while registering his fourth straight year in which he hit below .250 with mediocre power.

Neither of these deals is as silly as the one the Rangers negotiated with first baseman Mark Teixeira, who’s represented by famed agent Scott Boras. The deal will pay him $15.4 million over the next two years, which would have been his first two years in arbitration, number less than but comparable to those the Cardinals gave Pujols when they bought him out of his arbitration years with a long-term deal.

The problem here is that Teixeira is, if not quite a fraud, not exactly a superstar either. In his young career, he’s hit .311/.390/.629 at home, and .253/.334/.454 on the road; if you had to choose, you’d probably say he was closer in talent to Pena than to Pujols. Despite that, the fact is he’s averaged 38 home runs per 162 games and is just 25 years old. Boras, in an arbitration hearing, would certainly point out that 500-homer men Willie McCovey, Mark McGwire, and Ralph Kiner started their careers this way, and demand that his client be paid like a certain future Hall of Famer.

Here’s where you see the worst of arbitration – for teams, anyway. Forced to choose between contentious hearings, which they have at best an even chance of winning, in which they’d have to degrade their Gold Glove-winning All-Star first baseman, or paying him as if he were a future Hall of Famer, they decided to just suck it up and go with the latter. Now any 25-year-old first baseman who jacks 19 homers in a season can claim he deserves to be paid half as much – a cool $3.7 million per. There’s a reason so many execs wear bad hairpieces.

tmarchman@nysun.com