ESPN reports Teixeira to Yanks
DMZ · December 23, 2008 at 12:51 pm · Filed Under Mariners
That’s a great fit for the Yankees, really. They’ve got the money to spend and it pays off for them. This should be a huge upgrade and help their drive to improve run prevention too.
Plus it means the M’s don’t have to see him 20 games a year.
Dave vents about this move over at Fangraphs. I’m not in favor of a salary cap, but at some point, MLB has to do something to bring the Yankees back into line with the rest of the game.
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The positive I can take out of it is as far as our division is concerned, the strongest team just lost KRod and Teixeira – and has stated that they don’t want Manny.
The playoffs are a crapshoot, we have to be concerned with getting there against the Rangers/Angels/A’s – then we can worry about the Yankees.
“There is no guarantee of success, but if you don’t think that the dice are pretty heavily loaded in the Yankees’ favor after the signings they’ve made this offseason, I don’t know what to say to you.”
No kidding. In New York and Boston they also have to compete every year. If baseball in those cities doesn’t matter, MLB doesn’t matter.
Spoken like an ESPN writer!
from the CBA:
H. Uses Of Competitive Balance Tax Proceeds
Competitive Balance Tax proceeds collected pursuant to Section B(4) above shall be used as follows.
(1) The first $2.5 million of the proceeds (collected for any Contract Year) shall be held in reserve for the purposes described in
paragraphs (5)(b)(ii)(B), (5)(c)(ii)(C) and (5)(d)(iii) of Section E and, if the Parties agree based on experience under such Salary
attribution rules, another $2.5 million, or such other figure to which the Parties agree, of proceeds (collected for any Contract Year) shall
be held in reserve for such purposes. Any amount held in reserve pursuant to this paragraph (1), with accrued interest, shall be contributed
to the Industry Growth Fund and used for the purposes set out in Article XXV if and when the Parties agree that there is no longer any need for such reserve.
(2) Seventy-five percent (75%) of the remaining proceeds collected for each Contract Year, with accrued interest, shall be used to fund benefits to Players, as provided in the Major League Baseball Players Benefit Plan Agreements.
(3) Twenty-five percent (25%) of the remaining proceeds collected for each Contract Year shall be contributed to the Industry Growth Fund and, with accrued interest, used for the purposes set
out in Article XXV.
FWIW, “paragraphs (5)(b)(ii)(B), (5)(c)(ii)(C) and (5)(d)(iii) of Section E” deal with player options.
Complaining about the Yankess and their fans got old for me around the time I started playing in kid pitch leagues.
Just beat them on the field, or don’t talk.
The Yankees still have to worry about the playoffs themselves, of course. I don’t think either the Rays or the Red Sox were waving white flags, or had as many holes to fill this offseason as the Yankees. It’s still a tough division (though the loss of Burnett certainly weakens Toronto). And the Yankees still have a porous defense, though Texeira will help scoop out some of Jeter’s bad throws.
And no one has a clue how the new Stadium will play. That’s a lot of longterm contracts when you don’t know where your power alleys are.
“Spoken like an ESPN writer!”
Uh oh… now you’re on to my day job!
Seriously though, for every good signing those organizations make there will be a bad one to go a long with it. And While Tex is going to help the yanks a ton he’s going to have a season or two where he sucks or is hurt and they are going to be stuck with the tab.
Speaking of cheap free agents, Jamie Burke has signed a minor league deal with the M’s. Clement might be our DH after all.
Mariner fans: Not allowed to speak since 2004.
The “Igniter” in today’s New York Times:
“Unless something happens quickly with Teixeira, it is likely that López will enter January as the only Boras client to sign with a new team. Major League Baseball shuts down between Christmas and New Year’s Day, although some agents and team executives continue to negotiate. That means that the high-profile players like RamÃrez and Lowe and even the lesser-known ones like Willie Bloomquist and Ãlex Cora will remain uncertain of their 2009 destinations.”
The higher the expectations are driven in Yankeeland with all this money spent, the quicker the “fans” turn on their own overpaid players and make them want out. Alex hits better than God and still doesn’t have a ring, CC pitched like garbage in the AL last year…I think they’re gonna prove once again that the championships just can’t be bought. GO RAYS!
“Alex hits better than God and still doesn’t have a ring.”
I think His OPS last year was 1.500, which is just stupid. But He didn’t have enough ABs to qualify for anything.
Where are all the National League clubs anxious to sign Willie to a multiyear deal?
Or Jamie might be cut in spring training. That is the advantage of a minor league deal. You need a lot of catchers in spring training.
Wow, I must be old. When I played kid pitch the Yankees were in epic fail mode and no one gave a ****.
Your market-size based revenue sharing plan deals with that, though. It was brilliant. I’m appalled it hasn’t received any traction at all within the mainstream media.
You wrote that article almost 7 years ago.
Larry Stone was on KJR earlier and pointed out that even with these signings, the Yankee payroll would go down, due to their earlier appalling contracts coming off the books.
That is a humiliating factoid, spending this much money and watching their payroll actually go down. If we (the US) declared war on Haiti, spending $30B over ten years before finally securing a surrender from their government, I wouldn’t call it a victory. If I were a Yankee fan, I wouldn’t want to win with this method of roster construction anyway. If they can’t win a title after spending more in FA signings in one offseason than the entire GDP of handful of nations, they should be massively ashamed, IMO. Watching the Rays beat up on the Yanks in ’09 is going to be a joy for me.
I would, but I still haven’t gotten myself out.
How long before Manny signs with the Yankees?
The Yankees remind me of my MLB 2K7 for XBox 360 franchise. I think my team could beat them though.
MLB needs a salary cap ASAP! The Yankees have the 4 highest paid players in baseball now, which is insane. If there was a cap the Yankees wouldn’t win a World Series for a decade because they couldn’t mortgage their farm system for vets all the time.
Ooooooooooooooh boy.
How long has it been since the Yankees have won a World Series?
The Yankees spend a bunch of money for players. Big freakin’ deal. And Teixeira is worth $20+ million anyway.
A somewhat obvious set of questions:
* How often in MLB history has the top payroll team ended up winning the WS?
* Heck, how often does the top payroll team in each division end up winning the division?
My guess is that it’s a fairly low percentage for each, and this is a classic case of going for the easy-but-irrelevant comparison (see the book, Predictably Irrational) — but does anyone have the actual data?
You know what the best part about the signings is? We, and I say that as a Yankees fan, didn’t mortgage the farm system. Last year, the fanbase clamored for Johan Santana, and we stayed out of that. Consequently, we held on to our guys; we’ve still got Cano, Austin Jackson and the pitching troika of Joba, Hughes and Kennedy. What we’ve had problems with in the past is giving away talented players, not so much with bad free agent signings. Every time we had a prospect of note in the last years of the George era, we flipped him for an over-the-hill veteran. This time, we lost draft picks, which aren’t valueless, but one of ours is protected, so we don’t come away completely empty-handed.
I hate this line of reasoning. Just because guys like Steve Phillips and Bill Bavasi can squander away an advantage doesn’t mean that the advantage isn’t real and meaningful. The Yankees and Red Sox haven’t dominated the AL East because they know something that everyone else doesn’t–they’ve dominated it because they have a boatload more money to spend than everyone else.
Teams like the Marlins can be cute and occasionally increase payroll to pick and choose which seasons they want to go all in, but obviously their fan base is not happy with that approach, even though they have more 21st century WS titles than the Yankees do. I just don’t see how it is good business for MLB to let 4-5 teams dominate the free agent market, and for the Yankees to dominate most of those teams.
The problem with a salary cap is that you’re removing some of the disadvantage cheap and bad owners have by not spending money (in that their teams aren’t competitive).
It’s potentially MORE profitable to run a franchise to be bad and cheap (basically, field a replacement-level team, and collect revenue sharing money that high-spending teams kick in + the shared pool of revenue MLB doles out from national TV, etc.) than good and expensive, depending on the market, so I think you need to fix that problem before implementing a hard salary cap.
I just don’t see how it is good business for MLB to let 4-5 teams dominate the free agent market, and for the Yankees to dominate most of those teams.
It’s sort of counterbalanced by three rounds of playoffs and some well-managed low-revenue/low-salary teams, as the last few years have shown.
The other thing is that no MLB team is anywhere near as badly managed as the 1930’s Phillies are, and you don’t have the situation you had in the 1950’s where the Kansas City A’s got to be a farm team for the Yankees, so competitive balance today is far better than it was during those times, even if it’s off the peak of the 1980’s some.
It’s sort of counterbalanced by three rounds of playoffs and some well-managed low-revenue/low-salary teams, as the last few years have shown.
I guess I don’t consider that a real counterbalance. It’s the illusion of a fair playing field rather than a legitimately level playing field. And even then, the AL playoffs are essentially Yankees/Sawks vs. The Field.
I think it’s unlikely that this situation would stop me from watching baseball, but it gets under my skin that everyone is willing to downplay this advantage just because the Yankees haven’t won a WS in a while, even if they’ve been a really good team. It’s similar to how I found it irritating that people wouldn’t acknowledge that Beane’s A’s had a really freaking awesome run even though they didn’t win a WS.
Have I mentioned how much it annoys me when people get all ‘Well, the Red Sox are just like the Yankees blah blah it’s Yanks/Sox vs everybody else blah’. It’s stupid and it’s lazy.
You know where Boston’s payroll was in 2008? 4th. Behind not just the Yankees (200 mil vs 133 mil, but what’s half again as much compared to the opportunity to hate on Boston?), but behind the Mets and the Tigers as well, and within spitting distance of the five teams under them (including the Mariners at 117 mil) Ask them Detroit or Seattle that worked out for them.
Boston is a big-market team with a big-market payroll. But please spare me this ‘Boston and New York aren’t like the other rich teams’. There’s the Yankees and then there’s everybody else.
If you want to hate Boston, that’s fine, it’s baseball, everybody’s got to hate somebody. But hate them because their fans are assholes or you hate New England accents or Dustin Pedroia makes you want to shoot a midget; get a real reason.
The problem with the Yankees isn’t the Texeira contract; there’s a bunch of teams in baseball that could support that contract if they felt like it and the circumstances were right. It’s the Texeira contract and the Sabathia contract and the Burnett contract all in the same goddamn year; this while they’re already supporting retarded-when-signed contracts like Matsui’s and Damon’s and the not-retarded-but-retardedly-huge Rodriguez contract. I don’t have a problem with a team paying 20 mil a year for a superstar. I have a problem with the Yankees saying, ‘Screw it,’ and signing every superstar.
well, since lots of people don’t like the idea of manipulating what is a semi free-market with regard to payrolls, why not implement a system that is ties into it? I propose a system where deviation from the mean can be penalized in a pregressive manner. For example, if we find the average payroll for a given year, call it $100 million (just pulling numbers out of my ass to simplify the math in the argument), any team that is 20-30% above that would have to pay a penalty equivalent to 20% of their payroll. Any team that is 30-40% above that would be penalized 40%, 40-50% it becomes 80%. Again, these #’s are just onces I pulled out of the air for the sake of framing the concept.
In theory this would allow teams to splurge above and beyond their regular payroll for a few years if they felt they were close to a championship and needed that last piece, yet if anyone really tries to buy out the league i.e. this offseasons’ yanks, they would be whapped pretty hard with things that would eat up that competitive advantage they have monetarily.
Of course the MLBPA would scream bloody murder, but one thing I like about this idea is that it would only penalize the team(s) getting WAY out of proportion to the rest of baseball. If many teams upped their payroll at the same time, the payroll average would also go up and thus it would mitigate the penalty some, so the MLBPA wouldn’t have as much to bitch about.
Anyway, I’m sure this idea has been thought of before and there is some aspect to it I’m not seeing that makes it infeasible, but I think its a pretty interesting idea.
I hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, myself.
So?
Without the data, the idea that payroll is strongly coupled to performance is equally as much folk wisdom as “clubhouse chemistry.”
I freely concede I haven’t got the data myself. But googling on the string, “baseball payroll efficiency” brings up a number of hits, some by economists, no less. Here’s the abstract to one paper:
On the other hand, the paper came out in 2007 — before the 2008 Phillies/Rays Series — so the improved correlation “in recent years” may again be nothing but statistical noise (aka, “luck”).
DMZ:
Force the Dodgers and the Giants back to NY, that’ll do the trick. 🙂
I don’t know, when NY and Boston are playing in and winning every WS I’ll start to worry. As it is, over the past 9 seasons (going back to the last time the Yankees won in 2000), only three teams have shown up more than once in the WS (Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals) and only Boston has won twice. So 18 slots and 14 different teams. That’s better parity than baseball saw in the 90s, when Atlanta took 5, the Yankees 3, and Cleveland and Toronto each took 2 — only 10 teams out of 18
available slots (none in 1994).
In a lot of ways New York already has a third team: it’s called the Red Sox. The NY Times reports on it like it’s a local team — and why not: they own 17% of it (though they may be tempted to sell that given everything that’s going on with the economy and newspapers). And it’s not hard to find Red Sox fans in the five boroughs (and, like many people wearing Red Sox gear in Seattle, plenty of them have never gotten mail at an address anywhere in Massachusetts).
With regard to payroll efficiency, this is something I hope one of the sites like Fangraphs or baseballprojection.com starts tracking. The latter is already calculating the projected worth on a per-player basis, and the former could start since they have wOBA and UZR. They just have to hook up with Cot’s to collect the actual payroll data to figure out which teams are over- or under- paying the most.
Well, the way to get the MLBPA on board is to transfer the penalty money from the overspending teams to the underspending ones, and require that money be spent on payroll. They should be doing this now with the luxury tax and revenue sharing, so that an evil SOB like Loria can’t field a team that costs less than the money the other teams are giving him and pocket the difference.
Since I’m bored, and, since I’ve got nothing to do while I wait for my flight to head back home for Christmas, and since people have asked, here’s data…
2008 MLB Division Winners / Payroll rank in division / Payroll rank in baseball
TB / 5 / 29
CWS / 2 / 5
ANA / 1 / 6
PHI / 3 / 13
CHC / 1 / 7
LAD / 1 / 8
2007
BOS / 2 / 2
CLE / 5 / 23
ANA / 1 / 5
PHI / 3 / 14
CHC / 1 / 8
ARI / 5 / 26
So on and so forth, as to save space…here are the conclusions for the last 10 years
Average Division Winner payroll rank within division: 2.083/5 (nine times in ten years, a team with the lowest payroll in its division has won the division)
Average Playoff Team (incl. wild cards) payroll rank in MLB: 10.375/30
Average Number of Teams in the playoffs per year that had a payroll in the bottom 1/2 of MLB: 1.9 teams (24%)
Average Number of Teams in the playoffs per year that had a payroll in the bottom 2/3 of MLB: 3.1 teams (39%)
Average World Series Winner payroll rank in MLB: 8.6 (1st, 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 8th, five times outside the top 10, never below 20th)
dcmarinerfan: First, thanks for the work. So I’d say (in my own subjective way), that while pay is coupled to performance, it’s only loosely so. I find it interesting that in your ten-year sample, average and median payroll rank is fairly close. (when billg and I walk in to a bar, net worth isn’t 🙂 )
To put it a different way — Being in the top third of payroll obviously gives a team an advantage. But rank within that top third (notably the bleeding edge at the top) doesn’t appear to have much effect (or marginal advantage). “Necessary but not sufficient,” to use a piece of jargon.
Or, to put it yet a different way: George Steinbrenner — the only person in NY to pay full retail for everything.
It sure is nice to have a team to hate as much as this makes me hate the Yankees. Even if the M’s aren’t worth watching, there’s always another game going on where my rooting interest is strong…
Headline:
Tampa and Philly qualify for World Series: MLB Shuts Down all Operations
fwiw, the NYT thinks even the Yanks may cut payroll by trading Matsui or Swisher …