Let's review our community projections for Jeromy Burnitz.
| Community | .246/.317/.439 |
| ZiPS | .240/.311/.412 |
| Actual | .230/.289/.422 |
As bad as Burnitz was, ZiPS came fairly close to guessing his performance. The community was way too optimistic, even though we disliked Burnitz to begin with. Among individual guessers, several people were pretty close to Burnitz's on-base percentage or slugging percentage, but everyone who was very close on one was off on the other.
That's not too surprising. Burnitz hit 16 homers in 313 at bats. Independent of any other information about Burnitz's performance, that seems impressive. The trouble was that he no longer has any ability to make contact, and he also walks less than he used to. We knew those things before the season, of course, but those of us who guessed he'd hit for good power didn't guess that his weaknesses in batting average and walks would affect him so severely.
Can anyone think of other players who had an on-base percentage under .300 and a slugging percentage over .400 in at least a half-season's worth of at-bats? Tony Batista did it twice, and Jeff Francoeur did it last year. Those players share Burnitz's ability to hit a ton of home runs and play okay defense while still being a detriment to their teams.
In any case, Burnitz could have done a lot better than he did and still been a complete waste of $6.7 million.