Perhaps the most fascinating free agent on the market. Everyone seems to think Jeter has the leverage here and the Yankees have to sign him at whatever price, but I don’t agree. Plenty of aging superstars sign elsewhere at the end of their career, and it rarely impacts their legacy or their connection to the team. The Yankees have easily the most revenue in baseball and will continue to with or without Jeter… If Jeter isn’t their star, someone else will be. I have seen it argued that the Yankees owe him for past successes, but it isn’t like we has poorly compensated for them. Jeter without the Yankees though is just an aging 36 year old at a position where you can count the effective players in their late 30’s on one hand. If I’m a team that needs a shortstop I probably wouldn’t offer him more than say 2 years at 7 or 8 million per. He is simply not that valuable a baseball player anymore, and liable to get worse. If I’m the yankees I’d offer him 2-30, or 3-36 and let him walk if he wants.
The other problem for the Yankees is that the cost isn’t just money, but also the roster spot, which are very much limited. If Jeter is playing short and leading off, then someone else isn’t. It is nice to think that Jeter will graciously step aside when he is no longer an asset, but there no real reason to think so. Dealing with an aging superstar is among the toughest challenges for any team.
I think you’re right, and that’s what makes the negotiations so complicated. Neither side really has a lot of leverage. The Yankees could, in theory, go elsewhere and get someone who is younger and cheaper, but their fans would revolt. Jeter would have to take a pay cut to leave town and he wants to be a Yankee anyway. In the end, there’s no way he does anywhere. It’s only complex because the team doesn’t want to get taken to the cleaners but doesn’t want to offend him either.
$10M is small change for the Yanks and will not prevent them from acquiring the free agents they’re targeting. It’s not like e-Bay, however; the player can refuse to let the Yankees buy them.
But what does revolt really mean? Are they going to stop going to games? Stop buying merchandise? My guess is they will call talk shows and complain a lot, and then get over it. I expect any loss of revenue will be negligible.
Again, realistically, we’re never going to find out. There’s no way that the Yankees let him walk or that another team offers more money than the Yankees are going to pay. His greatest value is to the Yankees as the face of their franchise. A mediocre team won’t break the bank for him and a competing team will either have its own shortstop or would prefer to acquire a better, younger, less expensive one.
But yes, I think jersey sales would take a hit over an extended period, since Eduardo Nunez jerseys won’t outsell Jeter jerseys this year or any other year. And they’d lose the ability to able to market him. (Yes, I know his endorsement value would take a corresponding hit.) I don’t know if there would be any damage to ticket sales since there is probably a lot of pent up demand even in this economy.
True. The Yanks employ people who can put an actual dollar value on it. Fact is, the Yanks have purchased enough talent around Jeter to hide his deficiencies for the next couple of years. Other teams are not so fortunate. Jeter will eventually play himself out of an everyday role.
The problem with this whole debate is that the Yankees as is are already as much a “championship-quality roster” as is possible to assemble, regardless of whether Jeter is on the team or not. And that’s not because they’re necessarily better than every other team in baseball - it’s because they’re good enough to consistently make the playoffs.
Everything that happens after that is a complete crapshoot, because any team can win it all in the playoffs. It’s three short series composed of, at maximum, 19 games. Every team in baseball has 19-game stretches during where they get hot and dominate, and every team in baseball has 19-game stretches where the wheels fall off and starters get injured and they go .350. I mean, I’m a Giants fan, and I’ll readily admit that their WS win this year had as much to do with luck as actually being the superior team. The playoffs are just too small a sample size for skill to be the total difference-maker.
IOW, it’s impossible to “guarantee” a World Series win without literally owning all 25 of the best players in the game (thus depriving your would-be rivals of them). And really, not even then. Because let’s say our hypothetical NL champion Pittsburgh Pirates go up against a hypothetical Yankees team with a rotation of Halladay, Lee, Lincecum, Price, and King Felix and a lineup of Pujols, Utley, A-Rod, Tulowitzki, Hamilton, Crawford, Holliday, Ortiz, and Mauer. Pittsburgh would still have a significant chance of winning the series! It’d be pretty darn low by baseball standards, but the odds would probably still be well above 1-in-10 that the Pirates win it all. In a best-of-seven series, anything can happen.
So given that it’s impossible to ensure that you’ll win the World Series through roster moves, the best you can really do is play for the playoffs, because the differences in your skill level will show over 162 games. And the Yankees are already doing that. Their roster is as stacked as you can really get via the free agent market, because as others have said, they have essentially unlimited payroll. And that massive payroll advantage is what nullifies the Jeter effect - the Yankees will be a playoff caliber team whether they give Jeter an inflated contract or not (where “inflated” is defined as “likely upper limit of Jeter’s own demands”). Ultimately, they can afford to give the Captain a ludicrous 5 year/$125 million contract because that $25 million a year is a drop in the bucket for the Yankees. They can give him that contract and still sign whatever free agent(s) they want. Which gets them an excellent chance to make the playoffs next year, and thus as good a chance as is possible to win the World Series.
Another factor is that winning the World Series is not the only thing the Yankees (as an organization) are interested in. Building the brand, remaining the most popular baseball team in the world, increasing revenue streams are all worthwhile goals - and Jeter is very, very important to those goals.
The only way I’d say overpaying Jeter by 10 million is a bad move for the Yankees is if either they were overpaying him by more than his presence will bring in revenue-wise (hard to imagine, quite frankly) OR there was a better SS on the market that they were forgoing by signing him (which there isn’t).
See, this kind reasoning is just nonsense (not that it isn’t often invoked, including by the Yankees’ front office). The Yankees aren’t any more “one player away” from winning the World Series than the Rangers, Phillies, or Rays were. Any one of the playoff teams could have advanced and won the Series. The Rangers were almost eliminated in the first round. And very few people would have picked the Giants to win the Series just based on their roster alone.
The post season, consisting of short series, is largely a crap shoot. Basing your overall strategy on the failure to win two extra games in a particular week doesn’t make any sense.
Well, I don’t think, Jeter or no Jeter, Nunez will ever be the yankees everyday shortstop, but I would expect that a lot of those jerseys would become Cano or Cliff Lee or Montero jerseys instead.
Jerseys and other merchandise don’t really matter much to the Yankees anyway. Under MLB revenue-sharing, all of this revenue gets split evenly among the 30 teams anyway. The only exception is what is sold at the actual ballpark, but this revenue is relatively small.
Still haven’t heard a specific dollar amount (and the reasoning behind it) that would constitute an error on the Yankees’ part in signing Jeter. I’ve given mine as anything above 12-13 mil.
You still need to define what constitutes an “error.” It’s been pointed out several times that your bar of “difference between winning the World Series or not” doesn’t really make sense, since the playoffs can be remarkably unkind to superior rosters. And the Yankees have so much money that they can afford to blow $25 million a year on Jeteration and still field one of the best teams in baseball, year in and year out.
Well it’s not my bar, it’s the Yankees’ explicitly and often expressed standard. And an “error” is “something that will make the roster significantly weaker.” As of now, the 25th spot on the roster is being filled someone making close to the difference between Jeter’s actual worth and a 12-13 mil salary–once you go 10 mil above what you need to pay, you could get a real difference maker for your roster, and win the World Series as opposed to finishing third in AL east, which (with a few less injuries for the Sox) could well have happpened this year.
I’m not sure there is a number - obviously it would be a contract that either (a) prohibits them from improving at another position (so, I dunno, 30 million per?) or (b) prohibits them from improving at SS when Jeter proves he is incapable of playing there anymore (say, anything longer than 3 years?).
And you still seem to be attached to the notion that they need to improve in 2011. I see no reason to believe this - the same basic team won the WS in 2009, and won 95 games in 2010. Getting to the playoffs is all that is required, and they absolutely have a good enough team to do that in 2011, Jeter or no.
They wanted one more top-of-the-line starter, and they will likely get it unless Cliff decides he just doesn’t want to play in NY.
As others have pointed out, while they didn’t win the WS, they did make it to the playoffs, which is just about the only type of success that a very good team can almost guarantee in baseball. If they win 96 games again in 2011, they have an outstanding chance of being in the playoffs again.
The Yankees could replace Jeter with Troy Tulowitizki or Hanley Ramirez, and add Josh Hamilton to the outfield, Joe Mauer behind the plate, Neftali Feliz to the bullpen, and Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, and Cliff Lee to the rotation, and still not be guaranteed to win the WS. That team might win 128 games in the regular season, but a couple of bad breaks in the LDS could see them bumped straight out of the playoffs. That’s what can happen in a 5 or 7 game series. Even Billy Beane said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs,” meaning that even putting together a good team using rational calculations of player value can’t overcome the short-term luck factor.
I think this is mostly right. Jeter will stay not only because Yankee fans want him, and because the Yankees have loads of money, but because anyone else who might need a SS probably isn’t willing to pay the sort of money that he’s looking for, especially not for a deal of more than 1 or 2 years.
As for offending him, i don’t see why that should even be a consideration. They should offer him what they think he is worth to their organization, not some sort of massive handout based on past service. The Yankees have made Jeter an incredibly rich man, and he has been overpaid for much of the last decade, except for his few best years. It’s only with the Yankees that he ever could have made the sort of total income that he has made in baseball.
Well, JC Bradbury of Sabernomics values Jeter at $9 million for 2011. Note that Bradbury bases his calculations on value to an average team, and he argues that a high-quality free agent is worth more to a top team. For example, he values Cliff Lee at $18.5m, but says that he’s probably worth about $10m more to a top team.
The reason for this is that Bradbury is an economist calculating not just how good the player is, but also how much revenue he can be expected to add to a team’s income, and also how much a good player can help when the playoffs come around. The Yankees will probably make the playoffs with or without Lee, but getting Lee would almost guarantee it, and would strengthen them a lot for the playoffs, when your top three starters get a disproportionate number of starts.
There’s one more factor to consider with the Yankees, though. Whatever they pay Jeter, you basically have to add 40% in luxury tax. So, even if they only offer him $10 million for next year, that’s $14m out of their pockets. Similarly with Lee; an offer of $20m-per means a layout of $28m-per for the team. If someone else is really in the market for Lee, they might be able to offer him more money while still effectively paying less than the Yankees for him.
By now you should trust that if the Yankees see a hole in their roster, they’re going to fill it using (what they consider) the best available players. Not all players are available. Even then, a Burnett happens every now and again (Vazquez). Player evaluation is not an exact science, and a player’s past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.
Aging players on the downside of their careers should take pay cuts. Who else thinks Jeter is worth that kind of money? Let them pay it and hurt their team. Players know if a team mate is on the downside. It would not hurt the team to bring in a new face for the future.
