Adam Dunn and the difference between overpaid, useless

With baseball's winter meetings approaching, a fair number of White Sox fans might be wishing for the team to find some way to banish Adam Dunn.

Adam Dunn is vastly overpaid.

With the hoopla surrounding his arrival in Chicago, and the four-year, $56 million contract he was given, it's not hard to see why the Sox shouldn't be disappointed in Dunn. In the first three years of the deal, the lefty slugger has hit .197/.317/.407. That includes a disastrous Year 1 in which Dunn rushed back from an appendectomy and promptly hit .159/.292./.277.

When you sign a free agent in his 30s (Dunn was 31 the first year of his deal), you usually do so with the expectations that the player could very likely decline to the point you're better off punting the last year or so of the contract.

Dunn, however, has had a funny performance arc. The first year was nothing if not calamitous. Then he rebounded to be actually pretty decent in 2012, and was doing the same last year before a crummy September.

What the Sox get from him next year is anybody's guess. Assuming Dunn stays with the Sox -- a good assumption considering he's owed $15 million still for next year -- I think it's fair to say that no matter what happens, his sum total of production will fall short of giving the team any value for it's money. (In fact, both Baseball Reference and Fangraphs calculate his production as being worth negative 1.5 Wins Above Replacement).

While WAR might peg Dunn as being worth less than any guy off the street, is that true? The Sox don't really have another internal candidate to take at-bats at designated hitter who would be an obvious upgrade. That's why they forked over a ton of money for Dunn in the first place.

And Dunn was the team's best hitter last season. That really says more about how awful the Sox's offense was in 2013, but it also indicates that instead of spending resources to upgrade over Dunn, the team might get a bigger boost from allocating those resources to filling another gaping hole in the roster, like catcher, or adding another outfielder.

Going that route might be more palatable than eating Dunn's contract just to give money to someone like Mike Napoli, who like Dunn three years ago, might be the best slugger on the market. The similarities between the two -- including all of the strikeouts -- might just be too much to stomach for fans more eager to see Dunn depart than for someone to take his place.

Dunn will not make good on his contract, even if he could somehow rebound next year to hit. .250..381/.521 like he did before he put on a White Sox uniform. But that's really irrelevant to where the Sox go from here. The only thing that's relevant is trying to maximize what resources they've got on hand.

What they have still in Dunn is a hitter who can likely give them better than league-average offense, maybe better if he's protected from some of the left-handed pitching that's given him problems the last couple years. He's not blocking anybody from getting developmental at-bats.

In other words, the Sox still have a use for him, at least until they actually find a better hitter to DH, or can find a trade partner willing to save them a few bucks by not making them eat all of his salary.

Even if the Sox did make a splash with a free agent outfield addition, and wanted to add that guy and current outfielders Dayan Viciedo and Alejandro DeAza to the DH mix, Dunn's bat would probably still fit into some sort of platoon situation.

It won't be much consolation, but at least he'll still be able to give the team something.