Johnny Mac: 2 years, $3.8M total

Now teams, of course, have no way to know ahead of time how many runs the opposition is going to score on a given night, so you always want to push an offense to score as many as possible, in order to maximize the odds that at the end of the night you're on the right side of that all-important +1.

But over the course of an entire season you can easily figure out the average number of runs good or bad teams score in a game (as I write this, the Yankees are scoring 5.9 R/G this year, the Nationals an even 4 R/G, and the league average is 4.78 R/G). Moreover, I think it's reasonable to assume that the distribution of runs scored is at least somewhat normal - that is, that there are more times that teams score an average number of runs than a significantly above- or below-average number. Teams don't get shut out or score 13 runs in a game more frequently than they score somewhere in the 3-6 range.

It follows from that that you can win a lot more games by raising your R/G from 4.0 to 5.0 (because there are a lot of times that your opponent will score four runs, making the fifth one decisive) than you will from raising it from 6.0 to 7.0 (again, because there are presumably fewer occasions where a seventh run proves the decisive one).

So my back-of-a-napkin scientific opinion is that offensive value is non-linear, with the fewest wins to be gained at either extreme (going from 1.0 to 2.0 R/G is just going to mean your many losses are less embarrassing), and the most from going from a slightly-below-average to a slightly-above-average offense.

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All of that said, however, your second and final point in your post was actually the decisive one: the Blue Jays are not an above-average offensive team. They're currently scoring 4.51 R/G, below that league average of 4.78 (a figure which includes the NL, FWIW). Thus, there would in fact be tremendous utility to improving our offense from SS - or C, or LF. We can't afford to start low-value hitters like John McDonald or Reed Johnson (leadoff hitter reputation aside, he's hit .238/.297/.336 this year, which is abysmal from any lineup spot) because the rest of our lineup simply isn't good enough to compensate.

It's the apparent inability of the management and the media to recognize that fundamental and underlying failing that is the real problem with the Jays, not the resulting decision to give McDonald $3.8 million.

- Ash