In practice very few teams take this risk for various reasons. So this brings us to the following question. That's a lot of money for a guy who should by all rights be looking for a job doing something other then playing baseball. Somehow though his representatives were able to convince the arbitrators assigned to the case that Hunter was in fact worth MORE then that. Now maybe I'm being dense, but somebody must have screwed up some place on this one.
Lets look at a parallel case.
Rich Becker was traded late in the season to the A's to replace Tony Phillips who had broken his leg and was going to miss the remainder of the year. Becker played CF and hit lead off for most of the rest of the season. He compiled a .264 batting average and a .395 on base percentage for the A's. These are the sorts of number you expect out of a decent lead-off hitter. On the offensive side of things Becker has only one problem.