New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Tuesday, December 23rd 2008, 10:17 PM
Mark Teixeira brings big bat and Gold Glove to new Yankee Stadium as Bombers pull fast one on Red Sox and Angels.
It would have been ridiculous for the Yankees not to go after Mark Teixeira, to not pay him and his bag man, Scott Boras, whatever they wanted. But then it was ridiculous, and phony, of Brian Cashman and the Yankees to pass on Carlos Beltran at $100 million a few years ago. At the time the Yankees wanted you to believe that they had some kind of budget. They don't.
Maybe now they have finally spent enough money, after eight years of the greatest financial advantage in the history of professional sports, to finally buy back the World Series.
If not, Manny Ramirez is still out there. You can never be too sure. The last time the Yankees were sure they had put the Red Sox away by getting the hitter the Red Sox wanted was with Alex Rodriguez nearly five years ago.
Teixeira is younger and a switch-hitter and a better buy than Ramirez and he gets his money from the Yankees the way C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett did. Really: The Yankees would have been stupid not to do it, even if the Yankees now commit more than $400 million in future salary - for three baseball players - at a time when Cashman wants to still tell you how much money he had coming off the books.
But then if you were the Yankee general manager those are the books you'd want to talk about, too. Last winter, Cashman and the Yankees committed around $270 million to A-Rod when they were bidding against themselves, then another $100 million to Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada. Rivera and Posada, you may recall, were around here when the Yankees could beat everybody without outspending them two or three times to one.
"Re-investing" is the way team president Randy Levine described his team's spending the other day. This, of course, at a time when Levine expects New York City to re-invest in the Yankees by giving them $259 million more in tax-free bonds so they can finish building their new stadium.
But this is who the Yankees are. This is what they do. And all they do. Yankee fans, at least the ones who can still afford to go to the ballpark, love it. Bag men like Boras love the system most of all.
There were two teams being hit with a luxury tax the other day for the 2008 season: Yankees and Tigers. Neither one made the playoffs. The Yankees, of course, paid a lot more in taxes because they were more than $60 million clear of the Tigers. And Cashman thinks he gets to be thin-skinned because people point out his team spends money like this year after year and hasn't been in the World Series since 2003.
So now the Yankees try to get back there, win their first Series since 2000, with a payroll that is way more than twice what the Phillies spent to win the World Series last October. Maybe after $180 million on Teixeira and $161 million for Sabathia and $82.5 million for Burnett the Yankees can not only get back into the playoffs but get out of the first round for the first time since 2004.
A.J. Burnett and CC Sabathia
"You keep swinging for the fences," Cashman said the other day, when Sabathia and Burnett were the latest free agents to show up for Yankee money and talk about how it was always their dream to wear the Yankee pinstripes.
Cashman sure does swing for the fences. He's a sultan of swat, just from the baseball Brunei.
Cashman talks constantly about a farm system that is supposed to start producing young talent any day now. Just not today. Never today. Developing young talent is something the riffraff are supposed to have to do. The Yankees write checks and want to be carried around the room for keeping their payroll at around $200 million when nobody else in baseball is close. It must have been a hardship in the old days, winning with guys such as Brosius and O'Neill.
The total outlay of new Yankee money spent in the last two baseball winters is now nearly $800 million. Now the Yankees will try to save money on people such as Andy Pettitte so that they can say that they signed all these big-ticket players and kept their payroll under what it was last year. It is absolutely essential for Cashman to look as if this makes him some kind of numbers cruncher.
Even as he now has four players on his roster making more than $20 million per season: A-Rod, Sabathia, Teixeira, Jeter. They have about as much money invested in those four as the Phillies do in their entire baseball team.
You cannot do this in professional football, as much as owners such as Jerry Jones would like to. You cannot do this in the NBA, because even when teams such as the Knicks go wildly over the salary cap, they aren't out-spending the competition the way the Yankees do, year after year after year. Again: There is no sport where one team, if it has the resources, can attempt to buy this sort of edge.
The Yankees don't have to apologize. The way they do business, it would have been insane for them to pass on Teixeira. But it takes no genius, or vision, to do this, for Cashman or anybody else. Just deep pockets and owners desperate to look big.
So maybe the Yankees have finally spent enough money to win, after spending a couple of billion on salaries and revenue sharing and luxury taxes and somehow managing not to win a World Series since Mike Piazza's ball ended up in Bernie Williams' glove in October of 2000.
Maybe, at long last, they are back to being the best team money can buy. But if they still think they might come up a little short, why not buy Manny, too?
Yankee approach is on the money as Bombers avoid Boras bonus
By Bill Madden
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
December 24, 2008
Amendola/AP
Once again the Evil Empire has trumped the Red Sox for a high-profile player. And in landing Mark Teixeira in such stealth, last-minute fashion Tuesday, you have to give the Yankees credit for playing their hand brilliantly and signing the switch-hitting, Gold Glove first baseman for their price and not Scott (Avenging Agent) Boras' "one dumb owner" price.
After sitting on the sidelines acting like nothing more than casual observers as the Red Sox, Angels and Nationals engaged in active and aggressive bidding for Teixeira, Brian Cashman & Co. waited for Boras to come to them when the time had come to make a decision. In recent days the Yankees had gotten hints that Teixeira really didn't want to go to Boston, and that became even more evident when the Red Sox hierarchy flew down to Texas - at Boras' behest - in anticipation of making a deal only to be told there were higher bidders and they would have to increase their offer.
In the end, the Red Sox were at eight years/$170 million and Boras tried to convince them he had $200 million from another team, while there were unconfirmed reports that the Nationals upped their offer to nine years, $180million.
Then, when the Angels, who topped out their bid at eight years/$160million, announced they were no longer in on Teixeira, Boras knew the game was over, and if he wanted to get his client to a place where he really wanted to be, he had to call the Yankees. Just like he did at the last minute with Carlos Beltran back in January 2005, before agreeing to the center fielder's $119 million offer from the Mets.
This time, however, the Yankees were interested - to a limit.
At the beginning of this free-agent process, Boras was talking about a 10-year deal for $250million for Teixeira and only in the last couple of weeks, when he realized the flagging economy really is having an effect on clubs' spending in baseball, did he lower his ceiling to $200million. But all along, the Yankees' premise was that if they could get Teixeira for eight years at $22.5 million per - as they did with an eight-year, $180million deal - it would work for them for a lot of reasons.
No.1: They had already been paying 37-year-old Jason Giambi $23million to play a bad first base for them and at the end of Teixeira's deal he'll be a year younger than the departing "Giam-balco." In the meantime, Teixeira is a far more consistent hitter who is in his prime and will provide Gold Glove-caliber defense. For them and not the Red Sox.
No. 2: They realized they had no bona fide, middle-of-the-order power hitters coming in the system and that there are none foreseeable coming onto the market in the next couple of years.
No. 3: Even though they have now spent $423.5 million in long-term contracts this winter on Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, added $6million with the acquisition of Nick Swisher and given Chien-Ming Wang a $1million raise, the Yankees' payroll will still be coming down from last year's $222.2 million (which cost them an additional $26.9 million luxury-tax assessment, courtesy of Commissioner Bud Selig). That's because $88million came off the books in the expired contracts for Giambi, Carl Pavano, Bobby Abreu, Mike Mussina, Pudge Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte. And, with the Teixeira signing, Pettitte can pretty much forget about coming back to the Yankees now after failing to respond to Cashman's in-person urgings two weeks ago that he accept their one-year, $10 million offer. It's fairly evident no other club will offer him that much, and now neither will the Yankees.
Blumenfeld/Getty
Still, there will be undoubtedly be a hue and cry from the small-market clubs and the commissioner's salary police about the Yankees' spending, and I suspect even Cashman's preference would have been to improve his team more creatively than just by using the Steinbrenners' checkbook. But after missing the playoffs following 13 straight postseason appearances and not having drafted, developed and delivered a certifiable top-of-the-rotation pitcher or impact position player in nearly 15 years, just what were they supposed to do?
Say what you want about the Steinbrenners being baseball's Evil Empire - as Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino so famously put it after they out-maneuvered the Sox for pitcher Jose Contreras in a similarly stealth manner five winters ago - but nobody can say they don't put their money back into their team. They are moving into a new stadium next year, charging exorbitant amounts of money for a lot of the seats there and, unlike the San Diego Padres and Pittsburgh Pirates, they are doing what they can to make sure their fans get their money's worth.
It would be nice if the Yankees had done as good a job as the Red Sox in developing their own so all this crazy free-agent spending wouldn't have been necessary. But they haven't. Not by a long shot. And even after bagging the three biggest free agents on the market, there are still no guarantees the Yankees go back to the postseason next year.
For now, they and everyone in else in baseball should at least take satisfaction that Boras, for once, didn't get near the number he had sought for his premium free agent. And in the process, he lost the one team that could potentially have generated the very limited market for his second high-profile client, Manny Ramirez.
No comments:
Post a Comment