I think the fans of most non-ESPN teams get a bit sick every winter as the top players are gobbled up by the Yanks, Mets, Dodgers, Cubs, and Red Sox.
I get annoyed as well. But, I just look back at the teams that make the World Series. It really isn’t easy to buy a championship.
Stop! Please! Laughing too hard…!
Replacing Giambi & Abreu with full seasons from Teixeira & Nady might only be a wash.
However, don’t forget that Posada was mostly missing after a near MVP season. Cano and Cabrera both had very poor years and Matsui had injuries that cost him almost half a season and his production. Even Jeter was off most of the year.
The odds are good that production will increase in several of these positions, especially Catcher, Second and DH.
Could you expand on this statement? The Yanks aren’t spending more than last year, in fact right now they are about $15-16 million below last year. They are simply spending the money that came off the payroll.
As everyone knows AJ might turn out to be another bad deal and as great as CC is, he needs to match or exceed what Moose did last year to help the Yanks. The real improvement for the Yanks would be Wang staying healthy and Joba stepping up this year as a full-time starter. If AJ is healthy, the Yanks should pick up those extra wins needed to return to the playoffs and if Hughes or one of the other kids could be a 30 start starter with 10+ wins the Yanks will probably win the Division.
Hey, I don’t get it either but he was mentioned in the deal for Cameron with the Brewers. He is cheap and some GMs think the Yanks have just handled him terribly. (In fact I will actually agree with that last part.)
Yep, they kept giving him the baseball.
Well I thought the first big mistake was bringing him in and starting him in the majors. He should have started in AA Trenton and worked his way up. I don’t think he will ever be more than crap starter but the Yanks haven’t done much right with him.
You know, I can’t speak for the person to whom this is addressed. But for my part, I don’t feel much of a need to expand on it at all. This shit makes baseball boring. It’s not unfair, or morally wrong, but it’s lame. It makes it no fun to follow the off-season, because every story has the same ending. It makes it less fun to follow the actual season. It’s boring, and my interest in the 2009 baseball season has just dropped appreciably.
So it goes.
Didn’t they give him major league money though? Why pay a guy that much just to have him pitch in AA?
Because it was a stupid signing. You don’t compound a mistake with another mistake if you can help it. They seemed to have forgotten that even El Duke was put in AA & AAA before coming up to help the Yanks win.
storyteller0910, I thought you were a Met fan? Isn’t this a bit of sour grapes from the other NYC high payroll team that probably had the other two big signings.
I forgot to say as a Yankee fan my favorite part of this signing is now hopefully the Yankees won’t be pursuing Manny Ramirez.
Don’t get me wrong, I think he is one of the best pure hitters of my lifetime and a guaranteed first ballot Hall of Famer but I really don’t think the Yankees need another aging outfielder/DH type of any caliber. If he was five years younger, maybe.
The other funny part is living in Boston as I do I get a big laugh out of the abrupt changes in attitude on the part of the rabid Red Sox fans who call the local sports radio and leave comments on the local sports blogs. It went from “Teixeira is great, he’d be a perfect fit for the Sox” to “It’s just a bargaining ploy, the Sox will sign Teixeira, you’ll see” to “Oh well, we don’t need the bum anyways, the Yanks made a mistake signing him!” in like 72 hours.
Almost the exact same thing happened with A-Rod too, although it was spread out over a longer period.
storyteller0910 I actually agree with you, I think the ability of a couple of MLB teams to so vastly outspend the rest makes the game less interesting than it would otherwise be. It has measurably decreased MY interest in the game the last few years, and I’m a Yankees fan for crying out loud! I much prefer the NFL model where things are more democratic and interesting.
Igawa always seemed to me like it was a desperation move by the Yankees to try to counter the Red Sox signing Dice-K. It was like they really didn’t do their homework on him, they just signed him and hoped he’d do well. You could almost smell the panic.
I guess I’m trying to say it was always more about the headlines than baseball. Common sense went out the window.
That was exactly what it was. It was a classic George the 1st move like when he ordered Cashman to get Randy Johnson at at costs or dozens of other odd and silly baseball moves.
You might want to look at the standings again. The Yankees did need to improve their pitching and they’ve done so, but the offense needed work: it was down last year, and they were also losing the production of Abreu and Giambi (who did hit for power even last year). That scoring needed to be replaced, and they did it while adding a younger player who is better on defense than Giambi and better on offense than the platoon they used at first while trying to keep Giambi off the field. They’ve still got some dead weight, but this is an improvement for certain, and from here maybe they can at least improve the defense in the outfield.
Oh, come on, Jim. “I’m rubber, you’re glue” didn’t work on me in the third grade and it certainly doesn’t work on me now.
Look, maybe I’m cranky today, because I’m in the midst of trying to prep for no fewer than four separate family Christmas events (yay!) taking place in four different corners of the state (less yay!) over a two-day period (really not yay!), but I’m tired of being asked to defend my own subjective feelings about a sport, particularly when I make no effort to present them as objective truth.
Since you brought the subject up, no, the Mets did not have “the other two big signings.” They had one big signing, Francisco Rodriguez, and one major trade, in which they gave up a fair amount of talent to get J.J. Putz. There’s a difference, of course, between a free agent signing and a trade - particularly a trade where legit talent is exchanged on both sides. The Mets made their one big splash, and - like every team other than the Yankees - once they did, they had to stop. They didn’t go an offer a contract to Manny Ramirez. They’re wavering on Oliver Perez and Derek Lowe because the money available isn’t infinite. WIth the Yankees, there is an appearance of piggish excess that I find distasteful and boring. I’d find it equally boring if every big ticket free agent ended up on the Mets, or the Red Sox, or any team, because part of the enjoyment I get out of baseball is watching the annual redistribution of talent and speculating on how that redistribution will play out on the field.
With the Yankees, that enjoyment is muted, because there’s no fun in predicting where the big-ticket players will go: they’re all going to the Bronx. How will it play out? Well, the Yankees will almost surely win 95 games, barring injury, and I’m not so much of a tool that I root for anyone to get hurt. I favor suspense, uncertain conclusions, stories that develop. With the Yankees, it’s just, “here comes the fucking steamroller again,” and if the steamroller stalls out one year, you know they’ll just add a rocket launcher and armor plating and come back out again.
Comparing the Yankees to the Mets, or the Red Sox, because the latter two teams “also” have large payrolls and spend a lot of money (third and fourth in baseball in 2008, I think), by the way, is faintly dishonest. The fact that the Yankees are first in the sport is not the issue; the fact that the difference between their payroll and team number two (Detroit) was more than $70M - that the difference between their payroll and team #2 was more than the total payroll of a third of the teams in the league - is the issue. That’s a tremendous difference, and there is a qualitative difference between what the Yankees do, payroll-wise, and what every other team in the sport does.
Again, it’s fair. It’s morally and ethically spotless. It’s just not fun, for me, personally. Why should I have to play gotcha games with people in order to express that opinion? If the Yankees spending spree this offseason is your idea of compelling sports drama, and if you, as a fan, can enjoy the ensuing wins, then why do you care if I find the whole thing lame?
Yes, I think that their ability to simply outspend 90% of the other teams in the entire sport makes for an uneven playing field. And that takes a lot of the enjoyment to me out of watching the sport. I don’t care for it when other teams do it either, but the Yankees are the most egregious offenders.
And I’m not the only one.
Their payroll was already absurdly high, off the charts as compared to all other teams. That they can suffer through a season in which they were never in contention and simply replace all that payroll with enormous, market-inflating signings frankly suggests the system might actually be a bit faulty. “Well, they’re not spending any more than they did last year” is an absurd comeback. The difference between the Yankees and the #2 payroll team was greater than the entire payroll of half the teams in the American League.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/stats/aggregate?statType=batting&group=9 Here they are. Bosox 3 .Yanks 10,Tampa 13,Balt 11,Toronto 21
I will concede the payroll is absurdly high. Of course the Yanks luxury tax and the profit sharing from MLB activities that are mainly driven by the Yanks and Red Sox have kept a huge number of small teams profitable.
I think you all realize that Baseball is regional and not national like football. There can never be a huge national contract to balance out revenues. Somehow despite the infinite complaints, baseball is more popular and successful than ever with the Yanks followed by the Mets and Red Sox consistently using their advantage to outspend almost all other teams.
You want a salary cap, be fair and drop some of the weak sisters in the league or at least force the ownership to sell. Pittsburgh is a storied franchise that has not even tried to field a winning team in what 15 years? KC is another good example. If you want the Yanks to surrender their huge profits to an even larger degree how to you justify that as fair?
For several years the Yanks refrained from these kind of dealings and reach the point where they could go on a spending spree all at once. It might not be fun, but it is fair. Besides think how much fun it will be to laugh at the Yanks every time AJ goes on the DL.
Jim
The concession that the payroll is high is silly. It’s like you had a chance to defend “no, it’s not high”, when it is.
It’s good to hate on the Yankees, but there are a few haves and a whole lot of have-nots. Not every team can have a Billy Beane or Terry Ryan to squeeze every penny out.
It’s quite the conundrum, though. One thing is for certain: if baseball were more consistent in the level of play, I think you’d see baseball take root in more places. Well, not Florida. The Marlins like to make their fan base cry, just like the Phoenix Suns. I don’t know if it’s even a “for the good of the sport” issue. Personally, I’m sick and tired of having the Cubs, Yankees, and Red Sox shoved down my throat. It’s almost condescending when some other team has to play them on ESPN, for it’s like having YES-light on TV telling you how great the Yankees are and how, hey, the players on the other team are pretty good, too!
Meh.
The absurd payroll inequities do account for much of the hatred that the Yankees draw from fans of other teams, though. (The Sox, too-- though we could live with a cap, I think, more easily than the Yankees could.) Outspending every other team (or even several other teams combined) paints a huge target on your back, so every year you dont win the World Series gives great consolation to other teams’ fans. I loved last season, not just because the Sox won the division, but even if the Blue Jays had won and the Sox got edged out for the wild card, it would have given me great glee to watch the Yankees play so poorly with such a high payroll.
If the playing field levels out, you won’t see this as much. The Yankees create much of the animosity they get, and shouldn’t feel so surprised by the nastiness they correctly perceive.
Hear, hear!
Although I still manage to have some fun watching the Reds middle around pretending they will maybe one day be consistently competitive. Heck, I’d take a single season of winning baseball and a playoff appearance at this point.