Sloppy logic: Enough with the "if they could spend money on that player" argument

If you overspent on something that stopped running before you expected it to, do you use it as a reminder to be more careful with your money next time? Or do you say, hey, it's okay if I blow too much money on the next item, because I already spent beaucoups of money on the previous one?

That type of argument is one of the debates you hear over and over with the Derek Jeter contract negotiations.All too many people use the argument of "well, if the Yankee could spend money on A.J. Burnett and Carl Pavano and Kei Igawa and Kevin Brown and Randy Johnson and Javier Vazquez, they can spend it on Derek Jeter" to justify his contract demands.

This makes zero logical sense, for a variety of reasons:

* In very few of these cases (Javier Vazquez, Part Deux is a rare exception) it wasn't obvious that the Yankees were making a mistake at the time. Carl Pavano was the top free agent after the 2004 season. The Red Sox actually offered more money for him than the Yankees did. A.J. Burnett was the second-best pitcher on the free agent market when the Yanks desperately needed new arms; even though his 2010 was awful, he did help the Yanks win the 2009 World Series with his pitching and his own, own, intangibles. (Who wants pie?)

As for the Kei Igawa thing, that was a combination of bad scouting advice and the Yanks trying to compete with Boston picking up Dice-K. Also, keep in mind that the reason Yankees have kept him in the minors, and off the 40-man roster, instead of just dumping him is because his $4 million a year salary won't count as part of the team's MLB payroll. If they got rid of him, they would have to pay 40 percent luxury tax on that salary.

* Part of the reason free agents are able to command big money is leverage; if the Yankees don't pay Cliff Lee much more than the Rangers will, he'll stay in Texas. The only leverage Jeter has now is "pay me, I'm a Yankee legend." There isn't a single major league team that will pay Jeter, or any other 36-year-old shortstop with a .710 OPS, anything close to $15 million a year for three years. If Derek were 32 coming off a bad season, the risk would be worth it. This year, not so muh. The Yankees are already giving Jeter extra for his intangibles. Notice that at no point in any of his public utterances so far did Casey Close suggest that re-signing Jeter would help the Yankees in the best position to win. It's all about him being compensated for being a Yankee icon. Well, Yogi Berra is a Yankee icon, too, but I don't think it would do the Yanks any good to pay him $25 million a year.

* Paying legacy money can hamstring a team: Jorge Posada's terrific 2007 season, combined with interest by the Mets, got him a four-year deal from the Yankees. Keep in mind that he had never been on the disabled list his entire career up until that point. I thought four years was way too much, as history has shown us that most catchers are no longer catchers at 40. But others said at the time that since he started catching at a later age, he wouldn't be affected by that. So much for that. Now the Yankees are stuck paying $13 million through the end of 2011 for a catcher who can no longer catch.

* Where does it end? Robinson Cano will be a free agent in a few years. If the Yanks were to pay Derek Jeter $25M a year into his 40s, how much do you think Cano's agent is going to demand -- $35 million a year? How about when Phil Hughes and Brett Gardner are free agents?

This fuzzy logic isn't isolated to Yankeeland, though. Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy writes a column today suggesting that the Boston Red Sox fork over $60 million over the next three seasons to sign the captain:

What’s the harm in offering Jeter $20 million a year over three years? If you can pay J.D. Drew $14 million per year . . . if you can pay a Japanese team $50 million just for the right to speak with Daisuke Matsuzaka . . . if you can buy a futbol club for $476 million, why not spend $60 million to bust pinstripe chops for all the ages?

What do you think? Tell us about it!

Beantown Brouhaha: A-Rod disses Dan Shaughnessy

If there is any Boston writer that Red Sox fans (and reportedly even some Red Sox players!) despise, it's Dan Shaughnessy. The Boston Globe writer is the guy who basically invented the whole "Curse of the Bambino" thing. He's also known for taking himself a little too seriously, as he does in a recent Sports Illustrated column, where he chastises Alex Rodriguez for changing the TV channel when Shaughnessy was blathering on against the Yankees.

Here's the story. I saw this item mentioned in the LoHud Yankee Blog, and nowhere else, on Friday. Chad Jennings writes:

The television in the Yankees clubhouse was tuned to ESPN pregame. The group of players sitting around the television in charge of the remote were all rookies, young guys recently called up. They kept watching as one of the talking heads began ripping the Yankees rotation beyond CC Sabathia.


That’s when Alex Rodriguez walked over, called for the remote and changed the channel.

I briefly wondered who the anti-Yankee ESPN windbag was that annoyed Rodriguez so, but given how many people bash the Bombers on that network, that would have been a futile effort to figure that out (I'd have to sift through a cast of thousands!)

Anyhow, I didn't think about the incident again (it just wasn't that big of a story) until I read CHB's Sports Illustrated column about the incident. Somehow, Shaughnessy got wind that Rodriguez did not want to listen to his dulcet tones (most likely, he heard some snickering in the press box over it from one of his colleagues!) and he demanded an explanation from the player:

I spent last week in Los Angeles as a panelist on ESPN's Jim Rome Is Burning. On Friday afternoon, while the Yanks were in Boston in the cramped visitors' clubhouse (New York had 56 players on its roster for the final weekend), I was on TV expressing my thoughts about the Yankees' apparent disinterest in winning the AL East. I warned that it could be tough on the Bronx Bombers if they went to Minnesota for Game 1 and lost the first game with CC Sabathia on the hill.

Let me just point out that the 56 players on the Yankee roster stat is flat-out wrong. And given that there's a  a 40-player roster limit in MLB, Shaughnessy should know better. In fact, his own Boston Globe noted that it was "56 team personnel (players, coaches, etc.) who needed locker space in the visitors clubhouse."

Back to Shaughnessy's column:

Back in Boston, the Rome show aired live in the visitors' clubhouse. When Alex Rodriguez heard me casting doubt on the Yankee strategy and painting a doomsday scenario against the Twins, he walked over to the clubhouse TV and turned it off.

OMG! A-Rod didn't want to listen to Shaughnessy! How dare he! Can we just ban A-Fraud from baseball now, already? The nerve!

Then, Shaughnessy decides to insert himself into the story by asking why A-Rod turned the TV off:

Sunday morning in Boston, when the Yanks still had a chance to win the division, I sauntered over to A-Rod's locker at Fenway and asked him why he turned me off on the clubhouse TV.

"Too negative,'' said the Yankee slugger. "I didn't want our young players to hear that.''


This is probably just one more example of A-Rod being a faux leader of the champs, but it made me wonder about the Yankees strategy for the postseason.


"Don't you want to win the East and get home-field?'' I asked Rodriguez.


"I always think home-field advantage helps,'' said Rodriguez. "It's always our preference. But we're in a good place. I think we're ready to roll.''

After making those comments, Rodriguez went out and played in an 8-4 loss to the Red Sox, assuring that the Yankees would be a wild card entry in this year's postseason.

A few points:

1. What kind of egomaniac do you have to be to demand that a player tell you why he didn't want to watch you fulminating against his own team? And people think that "faux leader" A-Rod has an ego!

2. Is Shaughnessy aware that even if the Yankees had won Sunday, they still wouldn't have gotten the AL East title, thanks to Tampa Bay also winning? And nice little passive-aggressive blaming of A-Rod for the Yankees' loss!

3. The sportswriter can't even keep a consistent argument going. Earlier in the piece, he argues this about the Yankees not going for home field advantage:

The Yanks came to Fenway Park last Friday with a chance to win the American League East. Early in the weekend it became apparent that winning the division was not their top priority....I am not Joe Girardi or Brian Cashman, but this makes no sense to me....I would have attempted to beat the Red Sox.

The Yankees did not do this. Girardi used 17 pitchers in three games against Boston's Triple-A lineups. The Yankees concentrated on getting ready for the playoffs. And now they will play a superior team, on the road, in Game 1 of the American League Division Series on Wednesday night.

You can argue about some of the decisions Girardi made over the past month, like against the Sox the weekend before. But the fact is that in a 27-hour span over the last three games of the season, Joe started Alex Rodriguez for all three games, including Saturday's doubleheader. He did the same with Brett Gardner, Mark Teixeira, and Robinson Cano. Nick Swisher, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and Curtis Granderson played two of the games. Girardi used so many pitchers because the team's pitching has been terrible lately; not because he was trying not to win.

If the Yanks didn't care about winning on Sunday, why would they trot out their regular starting lineup that afternoon against the Sox's Pawtucket-laden squad, just hours after Saturday's grueling late-night, extra-innings doubleheader? You know, the very same Yankee lineup that Shaughnessy touts as being "daunting," with "perhaps the greatest infield in the history of baseball"? The writer never explains that decision. Guess his brain is still jumbled by the news that A-Rod doesn't consider him must-see TV!


What do you think? Tell us about it!

Pedro Martinez sez Yankee fans wanted to cheer for him

Here's something to get Yankee fans fired up, just in time for this weekend's Boston Red Sox series. In a recent interview, former Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez talked about how Yankee fans really, really like him (or at least respect him), and the one Boston writer he won't miss.

Writer Dayn Perry recently interviewed Pedro about a variety of topics. As is always the case with a Martinez interview, it is an entertaining read:

Dayn Perry: Although Game 2 of the 2009 World Series wasn’t your last game, I think that’s one of the things people are going to remember about the tail end of your career–a great effort against the Yankees and that smile you cracked while walking off the field. Why were you smiling at that moment?

Pedro Martinez: I was realizing that New York wanted to clap for me, but I was wearing the wrong uniform. They wanted to show me respect, and I knew that, and I loved it. If you understand baseball, the more they boo you, chant your name, the more respect there is.

I don't think Pedro is totally wrong here. As Reggie Jackson once said, fans don't boo nobodies. And Martinez  was the greatest Yankee nemesis of his generation. He played the villain very, very well against the Yankees. The fact he's intelligent and has a quick wit also helped add to his mystique.Watching the Yankees beat him -- twice -- in the World Series last year was great fun.

I was trying to think of a current player who can rouse Yankee fans' ire the way Martinez did, and I couldn't really come up with anybody that the fan base loved to hate the way it was with Pedro. ESPN's Bill Simmons had a piece last week about how the Red Sox players are boring these days. I thought the article was mostly pretty whiny. For one thing, Simmons seems to have been more of a fan of the Red Sox's past mystique via misery and masochism, than an actual Boston fan.

But it's also true that there is no current Red Sox villain on the level of Pedro Martinez. Jonathan Papelbon is my least favorite Red Sox, but even many Boston fans are tired of his act. And while lots of Yankee fans dislike Kevin Youkilis and  Dustin Pedroia, neither of them get under Bombers fans' skin the way Pedro did.

Here's some more from the Pedro Martinez interview about his thoughts on the Yanks:

DP: Have you thought about pitching for the Yankees?


PM: I thought about it a couple of times in my career. I was a Yankee fan growing up, a Reggie Jackson fan. I had a couple of opportunities to pitch for the Yankees, but it never worked out.

Imagine Pedro in pinstripes, and what an outcry there would have been in Yankeeland!

There was talk in the past week about how the Yankees supposedly nearly traded for Mike Lowell. He's one of the few Red Sox who wouldn't have caused a complete uproar in coming to the Bronx. Of course, he was once a Yankee, so that might have something to do with it.

Our Red Sox fan readers will appreciate this tidbit from the interview:

DP: Do you miss Dan Shaughnessy?


PM: No, no, no. That’s the only thing I don’t miss about Boston. I’m pretty sure other players feel that way, too.