The San Diego Padres' decision to sign Eric Hosmer to an eight-year deal -- really a five-year deal for $105 million with a three-year player option for another $39 million at the end -- is the most inexplicable move of the offseason. Not only does it overvalue Hosmer's production, it adds a player who doesn't fit the Padres' current or long-term needs, and bumps one of their better players to a position where he's going to be a problem defensively.

Hosmer's major league career has never lived up to the expectations everyone, myself included, had for him when he was a prospect. He was No. 3 on my draft board in 2008, and rose as high as No. 3 in my offseason prospect rankings before he made his major league debut in 2011. He was a two-way player in high school, throwing up to 94 mph off the mound, while also providing big power and a very good idea at the plate, athletic enough that he might be able to move to right field, with 30-homer potential that would let him profile at any position.

He's never reached that ceiling, however; even in the juiced-ball environment of the past two seasons, he's topped out at 25 homers and still has never slugged .500 in any season. He's just one year removed from a 2016 performance that had him below replacement level in FanGraphs' WAR and just one win above it by Baseball-Reference; the systems disagree on his defense, but agree that he was a well-below-average hitter for a first baseman that season. (First base defense remains an issue for even advanced defensive metrics, as players there are typically valued for receiving while those stats capture more fielding range instead.) He was even worse than that in 2014. He's never had two consecutive seasons in which his offense was above league average -- not just for first basemen, but the entire league average (by wRC+). His 2017 season was superb, but an outlier; he posted a career-high BABIP and walk rate, all of that production coming in the last five months of the season after he was below replacement level in April.

There's reason to believe he'll produce a couple of three-WAR seasons over the first five years of this deal, but there is no reason at all to believe he'll do it enough times to justify the cost. Dan Szymborski's ZiPS forecast has him topping out at 2.4 WAR in 2018 and 2019, producing 10 WAR total before the opt-out hits. If that's right -- and it's a lot more linear than Hosmer's sine-wave career has been -- then this is a bad deal for the Padres.

The Padres were among the worst fits of all for Hosmer, who doesn't help them now and probably won't help them when their huge wave of prospects starts to impact the major league team in 2021 and beyond. San Diego already has a first baseman on the roster, Wil Myers, a good-but-not-great player who will now have to move to the outfield, a position where he's worse defensively and will probably become an adequate-but-not-great player. The Padres won 71 games last year; if you think Hosmer will repeat his career year of 2017, when he was worth about four WAR, and factor in some growth from young players like Manuel Margot, you get ... something under 81 wins. And you probably don't get there in 2019 or 2020, either, not without a lot of additions to the pitching staff that will only be more difficult with the money committed to Hosmer. All of that even assumes that Hosmer doesn't revert to 2016 or 2014 form, or that moving to one of the majors' worst home run parks doesn't further depress his power output.

The most inexplicable part of all of this, however, is that the Padres managed to severely overpay even though they were bidding against exactly one other team. The market for Hosmer looked bad in May, and only became worse over time; I wrote while Hosmer was struggling that there would be maybe four teams looking for first basemen this winter, and only two expressed interest in signing Hosmer at this contract level: the Padres and the Royals.

Since their abortive playoff push going into 2016, the Padres have done just about everything right, drafting exceptionally well, signing a slew of top-end athletes with huge upsides in the international market, and snagging several legitimate prospects in sneaky trades, including their No. 1 prospect, Fernando Tatis Jr. They have prospects coming at every position, and if there's really any need here for them to supplement the major league roster now, it would be in the rotation rather than at an easy-to-fill corner spot, because their best pitching prospects are all a year or more away from helping the rotation -- and pitchers are volatile commodities to begin with.

The best-case scenario for the Padres now is that Hosmer hits like he did in 2017 again this year, and either establishes trade value for himself even with the new deal, or at least opts out after 2022 and goes somewhere else for his decline phase. The more likely scenario, unfortunately, is that he repeats his track record, alternating solid years with awful ones, and eventually ends up in the way of a better player, perhaps one of the Padres' many top outfield prospects. Even at what appears to be a slight discount in the annual salary, reflective of the industry's suddenly parsimonious attitude toward free agents, this is just the wrong move for San Diego on too many levels, and a huge, baffling misstep for a front office that has done so many things right in the past 18 months.