For San Francisco Giants fans, last night’s All-Star Game should have been a wonderful event, a chance to show off their beautiful ballpark and shower love on the twin pillars of their franchise — Barry Bonds, their unaccountably beloved left fielder, and Barry Zito, their $126 million ace. Events, though, take their own course. The Giants are in last place, and Zito is a bust. His 6–9 record and 4.90 ERA are bad enough, but the man simply doesn’t have a fastball anymore, and never having been much of a control pitcher, he doesn’t look to have much of a chance of making this deal look even tolerable by becoming a classic crafty lefty.

When Zito was a free agent last fall, there were two schools of thought on his future. The first, with which I agreed, was that his tremendous durability and persistent ability to induce bad contact made him a risk worth taking. The second was that his mediocre stuff and mediocre command would catch up with him. Some people looked at him and saw Tom Glavine, others saw Mike Hampton; on early returns, it looks as though the skeptics were right.

So, a simple question: Where might this deal rate among the worst of all time? Zito has been a very good pitcher for a very long time, so it’s obviously far too early to say; a bad half doesn’t make him a bust, and he may yet turn out to be the new Glavine. For now, though, things aren’t looking good. Zito may be remembered for decades to come, for all the wrong reasons.

That’s no necessarily fair. Ballplayers get paid what someone is willing to pay them; it’s an obvious point, but one people forget. Zito, so long as he’s giving his best effort, isn’t robbing the Giants; he’s a partner in a business deal gone sour. It’s also worth noting that ballplayers don’t make that much money, relatively speaking. Last year, for instance, the top 25 best paid hedge fund managers made $570 million apiece. James Simons raked in twice as much cash last year as Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, and Kevin Brown have collectively earned in their careers.

Fair or not, though, no one knows who Simons is, and everyone knows who Rodriguez is. A-Rod’s contract is the absolute gold standard for bad contracts, and will probably never be surpassed. That’s certainly not his fault — you can’t ask a ballplayer to do much more than hit like Jimmie Foxx while playing Gold Glove defense at shortstop and never taking a day off. Still, in 2006 dollars, the contract Rodriguez signed in 2000 was worth $295 million. According to Forbes’s estimates of franchise values, that’s more than the A’s, Twins, Brewers, Royals, Pirates, Marlins, and Devil Rays are worth. It’s a bad contract.

The next worst is almost certainly Hampton’s 2000 deal with Colorado, and that’s probably the fairest comparison. In 2006 dollars, that deal was worth $142 million — more than Zito’s. The former Met ran up a 5.75 ERA in his first two seasons in Denver, served as a passable no. 3 starter for two years in Atlanta, and blew out his arm in 2005; he hasn’t pitched since.

Here we run into a quandary. Let’s say Zito pitches the way he has this year for the rest of his deal, and putters along pitching as well as a fringy Class AAA pitcher, but totting up 200 innings a year. Would that be better or worse than racking up a couple of passable seasons and then conveniently getting hurt, freeing up your roster spot for a better player and allowing your team to cash in on your insurance policy? I’m not sure, but I suspect that if Zito actively damages his team’s pennant hopes for seven years, he still won’t be remembered as being a bigger bust than Hampton. There’s a lot to be said for simply playing, no matter how badly you perform.

Those, surprisingly, are the only deals to which you can really compare Zito’s. Chan Ho Park and Darren Dreifort signed legendarily bad contracts in 2001, but their combined value in 2006 dollars was $136 million, not much more than Zito’s deal is worth. And while various other massive contracts, like those Kevin Brown and Jason Giambi signed, have gone bad, the players involved have generally put up some excellent seasons before falling apart.

It’s also worth noting that the only contracts worth mentioning here are recent ones not because bad deals weren’t made in the past, but because the dollar amounts have gone up so much. In 1989, the Royals signed defending Cy Young winner Mark Davis to a $14 million contract, worth $23 million in 2006 dollars. This made him, atone point, the third-highest paid player in the American League, and Davis couldn’t have been more disappointing — after saving 44 games in 1989, he saved 11 over the course of the deal, and never once posted an even average ERA — but, like the bad contracts players like Daryl Strawberry signed around the same time, it just doesn’t compare. A $23 million contract is not the same as a $121 million contract, no matter how each rates relative to other contracts of the day; to say otherwise would be a bit like saying that Lip Pike, who once led the National League with four homeruns, was as strong a power hitter as Ryan Howard, who led last year with 58.

And this brings us to a final point, albeit one that might not bring too much comfort to the miserable Giants fan. These massive contracts can only be signed because there’s so much money sloshing around baseball right now, which is of course the result of the game’s unprecedented popularity and success. Zito may or may not surpass Hampton and settle comfortably behind Rodriguez in baseball annals, but either way, his horrible contract is a sign of the game’s great health — a worthy thought on which to dwell as we enter the second half of the season.

tmarchman@nysun.com