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Heck, every losing team in baseball has too much salary going out for too little WAR coming in.  Man, that's why you lose.  But not all of that sum going out was necessarly "wasted!"
Ichiro?  Wasted?  Well, sure...if you discount all the great years he's had undear that contract.  He's underproduced this year...but that doesn't mean his salary was wasted.  Was Derek Jeter's last contract "wasted?"  Sure looks like it THIS year.  But the salary is more than a snapshop investment.
Bradley's chunk of change?  Wasted in the sense that you don't get anything out of it.  Not necessarly wated in the sense that it is little worse, right now, than Silva's.  So the waste was accumulated YEARS ago.  Not in '11.
Jack Wilson?  Bad investment.  I'll call this one wasted...and many folks called it as such when first spent.
Figgins?  Wasted!!!  Bad investment.  Lots of people called it so from day one.  Even I did.
Aardsma?  $4.5M, over multiple years, for a closer not named Rivera is wasted.  This was stupid. 
Gutierrez?  This one is not wasted, yet.  You got a great year out of Guti for that amount.  Now two disasterous ones follow.  This year it looks bad.  Two years ago it looked classically cheap.  I think he's still not going to ever be the player he was two years ago.  But he could recover, next year, to be a $4M+ player. 
Contracts will never work out so that you get, each year, the appropriate WAR return on your salary investment. 
Losing teams are losing because they are getting negative return. Bad years accumulate. 
If Smoak was getting 6 million, would that be a wasted salary?  Not if he lights it up next year as part of that very same contract.
 
moe