A general manager was discussing the free agent market. “Timing is everything,” he said. “Imagine if the Yankees had all that money to spend and had this market.”
Exactly one year ago this week, Friday, Dec. 18 to be precise, the Yankees signed CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett. Nineteen days later, Jan. 6, they signed Mark Teixeira. No one knew it, but in that brief time they set themselves on the way to their latest World Series championship.
Obviously, the Yankees needed more to go right for them than good performances from Sabathia, Burnett and Teixeira, but their signing, for a total of $423.5 million, served as the catalyst for the Yankees’ return to championship status.
But what if, as the general manager suggested, this year’s free agent class had been last year’s? Could the Yankees have spent their money on three players who could have meant and did as much as Sabathia, Burnett and Teixeira?
The Yankees signed Sabathia and Burnett because they believed they were the best pitchers available, and the Yankees desperately needed pitching. They hadn’t planned on signing Teixeira, the best all-round player on the market, but he became available when the Red Sox withdrew from the bidding, refusing to pay the price his agent, Scott Boras, had placed on him.
Could the Yankees have found three such players in this year’s market?
John Lackey was considered the best starting pitcher available, but he falls short of Sabathia. The next starters in line – Randy Wolf, Jason Marquis, Joel Pineiro, take your pick – could be the equivalent of Burnett, but any pair would not be expected to match Sabathia and Burnett.
The two best position players this off-season, Matt Holliday and Jason Bay, do not match Teixeira’s offensive productivity or his defensive ability.
So would the Yankees have been in the same strong position they wound up in had this year been last? “It wouldn’t be the same,” said the general manager, whose question started this game.
Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, readily agreed.
“You wouldn’t want to do it in this year’s market because it’s radically different,” Cashman said. “Last year was filled with talent that comes along once in a lifetime. We saw that coming and this coming and that’s why we were so aggressive last year. We wouldn’t have done it this year.
“The previous year we passed on Santana forecasting the free agent market in advance just as we forecast this one a year in advance. Next year’s market is radically different than this one. It projects to be very, very good. This one is a down market.”
The lower quality of the market hasn’t stopped other teams from using it to become stronger, most notably the Red Sox, who are acting no less the Evil Empire than their president, Larry Lucchino, accused the Yankees of being several years ago when they signed Jose Contreras, a free agent Cuban defector.
One fact of recent baseball life you can count on: If the Yankees or the Red Sox win it all one year, the other can be expected to bring out their strongest economic weapons.
In bringing out theirs this month, the Red Sox have done what they and other teams have long hated the Yankees for. Teams naturally resent the Yankees for their enormous payrolls. But they especially hate the Yankees for their ability and their readiness to spend money to make up for their mistakes.
The Red Sox have lost their right to hold that economic fact against the Yankees because they have just done it themselves. They signed Lackey to an $85 million contract even though they already had a pretty good starting rotation headed by Josh Beckett and Jon Lester.
Daisuke Matsuzaka is in that rotation, and the Red Sox spent a lot of money – $103 million – to put him there. But they seem to have become disenchanted with the Japanese right-hander following a season of injury and pitching problems. That’s where Lackey comes in, and the Red Sox eagerly spent $85 million to make sure they got him.
They had been prepared to commit much of that money to Bay, who played left field for them last season, but when they learned he would cost more than they were prepared to pay they instantly went to Plan B, spent the money on Lackey and signed another free agent, Mike Cameron, to fill the gap in their outfield.
They would win with pitching, they decided, and if they were good enough to get to the World Series, they could use three pitchers the way the Yankees did this year.
Meanwhile, other teams have been active on the pitching front, figuring that’s where championships are to be won.
The Phillies already had Cliff Lee from a 2008 trade, and he demonstrated his value by winning the two World Series games the Yankees didn’t win. But that wasn’t good enough for the Phillies so they went out and traded their best young prospects for Roy Halladay.
Considered by some the best pitcher in baseball, Halladay had a poor second half last season, but his ineffectiveness arose after the then Blue Jays’ general manager blundered and made a public spectacle of Halladay and the team’s attempts to trade him. The Phillies have themselves one very good pitcher.
But that’s all they have – one – because as part of the three-team trade in which they obtained Halladay they agreed to send Lee to the Mariners. The Phillies indicated that they would be unable to retain Lee after next season, the last in his contract. But the pitcher’s agent said that thinking was premature.
“What’s being portrayed in the media is completely inaccurate – that we presented something or the club thought our position was going to preclude them from being able to do a deal,” the agent, Darek Braunecker, told ESPN.com. “We didn’t get far enough down the road in negotiations” to explore the details.
Lee, Braunecker added, “really enjoyed Philadelphia. Since the end of the postseason, his intent was to remain there beyond next season. That’s been the goal. Unfortunately, some circumstances transpired that we couldn’t control.”
Perhaps the Phillies simply didn’t want to have to pay both Halladay and Lee. That would be typical of the Phillies, who have often played the role of a low-revenue team in a high-revenue market. But consider the alternative the Phillies had.
They could have had Halladay, Lee and – they would hope – a resuscitated Cole Hamels for their own dazzling pitching troika, and then we could have had a wonderful World Series matchup of Beckett, Lester and Lackey versus Halladay, Lee and Hamels.