a) If anybody here wants to give Pavano a 3-year deal, they are in an extreme minority. Doug Melvin doesn't want to give him a 3-year deal. Perhaps you should have read this thread better. b) Some of those players you listed are decent guys to round out a roster. One, Hawkins, is actually quite good and had a healthy track record until 2010. Several of them were not signed as free agents and only two, Suppan and Hall, were given silly contracts (I'm not counting Gagne because it was a one-year deal, plus he actually pitched pretty well the second half of the season). If you took all the salaries of the bench players, middle relievers, and end of rotation starters and invested them all in one star, how would you field the rest of the roster?