And all this, right after a season when a small-market team with a small payroll won said division.
These signings won’t make as much difference as everybody with a stake in the outcome (I’m a Red Sox fan) seems to think it will. Okay, they effectively replaced 3 older players (Mussina, Pettitte if he doesn’t re-up, Giambi) with younger ones, which can’t hurt, but said players had pretty decent seasons (Pettitte had a down year)-the upgrades aren’t that much better. Otherwise this roster is still aging-the SS is going to be 35, the closer 39, C 37, DH and LF 35.
Yeah, you’re assuming that the Yankees are done. We’ll see if your calm survives the inevitable and imminent signings of Manny, Derek Lowe, and Ted Williams’ severed head.
You’re kinda missing my point here: it’s not that I’m claiming that the Yankees’ payroll means they will inevitably win the division, it’s that they’ll miss the playoffs ONLY when (as last year) their roster get wracked by an abnormal series of injuries, so that in effect those among us who are tasteless and sick bastards to begin with are ROOTING for those injuries (and, praise Allah, deaths) to occur so we can see a semblence of competitiveness in the AL East. I’d rather just watch baseball, but this ain’t it.
Posada and Matsui and Wang and some others will probably have much better years than they did in 2008, so with the above-listed improvements the Yankees are now seriously advantaged, through their payroll, over the competition.
You know what, if anything the Yanks seem to be better at this in the 50s into the early 60s than they are now with the huge payroll difference. The Yanks effectively used the KC A’s as a farm team if you think back on it. This gave them a huge advantage at the time. They also had the ability to sign almost any prospect they wanted and it really did not cost them a lot. If George Weiss wasn’t the second most bigoted* GM in baseball, the Yanks outfield would have had Mays and Mantle.
This team just made the big splashy signings and it looks bad and sounds bad and (hopefully) they just bought their way back to the playoffs but this team is still nowhere near as good as the ones they put together the right way in the mid to late 90s without the big free agents and aging All Star signings Those teams were only near the top of the salary range each year.
I really would not mind if a salary cap got introduced as **Rickjay **suggested. Let it be phased in and force the Yanks to compete smarter. They would still have an advantage over many teams but not the big advantage over every team. Right now whenever the Yanks make a Pavano type mistake, they just try to spend their way out of it and can. The luxury cap appears to have stopped the spending of the other rich teams.
Jim
Yanks were the second to last team to add a black player and the Red Sox were last.