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I doubt that. 2 years, $30M is my guess.
And no, it won't hurt them. Even with those big contracts mentioned, they'll have an additional $100 mil left to build a team.
I think a soccer-style "relegation" system is better, if we're wishcasting. 15 straight losing seasons? AAA for you. But it would never happen. Owners compelled to spend money on their teams? Outrageous.
More than that, IMHO. If the Yanks extend him this offseason, his MVP-caliber 2009 makes a significant pay cut unlikely. His last deal averaged $18.9M which might be about right. If Jeter plays through 2010 before he and the Yanks negotiate, his 2010 performance would obviously be a factor but right now Jeter doesn't look like he's about to decline sharply despite numerous assertions here last offseason that he'd already entered that phase and his next contract would be an albatross around the Yankees' neck. If Jeter wants 3yrs/$50M he probably gets that or a bit more quite easily.
Depends what his 2010 looks like.
Depends what his 2010 looks like.
Which is why negotiations haven't started yet.Cash doesn't want to renegotiate on 2009
Seems like the obvious way to do it would be to make all the contracts of a team below the salary floor increase proportionally until they're at the floor. If a guy's due to make $400k for a team that's at half the payroll limit, he gets $800k instead.
That way, there's no incentive for teams to spend just for the sake of spending, and low-spending teams won't be penalized for making veteran-for-prospect deals that are in the team's best interest.
But the only real "Yankees problem," if you want to call it that, is that it puts three teams in the AL East at a big disadvantage when it comes to competing for a postseason spot. (Nobody's feeling sorry for the Red Sox.) Of course their financial power affects the other 26 teams as well, but in terms of winning one World Series after another, this year's team was a near perfect storm---EVERY regular position starter with the (slight) exception of A-Rod outperformed his 2008 production.
How likely is that to repeat itself? The "worst" you can say is that the Yankees are almost always going to be a strong favorite to make the playoffs, but the plight of the low end teams in the rest of the league can hardly be blamed on them. And beyond that, winning the World Series is always going to be dependent to a great extent on unforeseeable factors---injuries, etc.----that can't possibly be predicted in April.
That is a really good idea.
So would someone under this situation have to take a pay cut if he got traded?
Nor should they, but let's not lump them together either. The Yankees outspent the Sox by $80 million+ this year. Not complaining, but often the two get put into one category in terms of payroll spending and that's simply not the case.
You've got to be joking. Bud has been focused on the "Yankee Problem" like a laser beam since he was installed as "interim commissioner". What is the "revenue sharing" scam if not a very lucrative way to address the "Yankee Problem"? What is the "luxury tax" but a very focused attempt at making millions from the "Yankee Problem"?
To some, nothing short of a "Final Solution" will be sufficient to address the "Yankee problem".
But the Sox had a goal of winning only 95 games, while the Yankees intent was to win as many games as possible. High standards do tend to cost more than middling ones, but that isn't the Yankees fault.
How will Rivera needing to be replaced diminish their ability to handle a $200M payroll?
The victim of the "Yankees Problem" has never been the Royals, its been the other good AL East teams, namely, Tampa Bay, and other small market teams the Yankees steamroll in the playoffs, namely the Twins and A's.
The Royals and Pirates failure is, and always has been a separate issue that is related to economic disparity, but certainly cannot be largely attributed to economic disparity.
If you want an example of this, you should take a look at the NHL, who have a salary floor. As a result, you'll occasionally see what appears to be a completely idiotic signing made solely for the purpose of getting above the league minimum.
Of course, the NHL salary floor is also at a high enough level (something like 70% of the cap) that it guarantees that a decent number of teams can't actually turn a profit.
Nor should they, but let's not lump them together either. The Yankees outspent the Sox by $80 million+ this year. Not complaining, but often the two get put into one category in terms of payroll spending and that's simply not the case.
I wasn't trying to put the Red Sox and Yankees in the same payroll category, but the existence of the wild card gives the Red Sox a second path to October that most every other AL team outside New York and LA is unlikely to be able to take advantage of more than every once in a while.
I hate the Yankees as much as any good and decent American, but winning 22 AL pennants and 17 World Series in 29 years from 1936 - 1964 is a "problem"; winning the World Series every nine years not quite so much.
Obviously, the Yankees have a tremendous revenue advantage which they translate into an obscene payroll advantage, but one thing that's really helped them in this run is that those 4 up-the-middle guys that they developed - Jeter, Posada, Pettitte, and Rivera - have remained elite players for well over a decade, which is really unusual. Compare that to, say, the Oakland A's. Sure, the A's couldn't have afforded to keep the core of their great teams from the early Aughts, but how much better would the 2009 A's have even been if they'd kept Giambi, Tejada, Hudson, Mulder, and Zito? Most of those guys are old and broken down now.
The thing that works against being able to just go out and buy championships in MLB is the fact that free agency doesn't kick in until a player's 7th season and by then, most players are on the downside of their careers and declining every year thereafter. At least so far, that hasn't been the case with the old Yankees. I can think of three possible reasons (all of which may be true to some extent) for this: (1) sheer luck, (2) players are aging better in general, and the Yankees are benefitting from this, or (3) the Yankees in particular have figured something out to help their players age better. To the extent that (2) is the issue, that could portend a growing "Yankee problem" as free agency becomes a better bet if players age better. To the extent that it's (3), unless the Yankees' secret costs hundreds of millions of dollars, that's just the Yankees being "smarter". And, to the extent it's (1), that's just baseball.
No, it's not. But is that how the next 10 or 20 years are going to play out? The issue that Rosenthal has raised is this -- what happens going forward if the Yankees continue to sign the best FAs and international FAs every year and draft reasonably well? I agree that the Yankees winning the WS every few years isn't a problem, but it's not hard to imagine a scenario where the Yankees return to some version of their 36-64 dominance. And that would be a problem.
As I said in the last discussion about this, I'm not in favor of any sort of salary cap or floor, but I do think the entire free agency and arbitration system needs to be rethought.
Dunno. Depends on how their current debt load affects them. One of George's strengths was his ability to keep creditors from worrying about the debt load. No idea whether things will stay that way.
I don't think winning the World Series should be the only metric we evaluate though. The fact they've made the playoffs all but one year since 1995 is probably not good for baseball.
Darn it--I knew the Red Sox were doing something wrong!
Isn't that more a matter of the White Sox overreacting to a poor season?
With Holliday they'd have 7 or 8 all stars on the field at once. Insane.
Nobody is paying Derek oodles of cash as a 36 year old shortstop. Nobody but the Yankees. Who should. He's the face of the franchise and has helped them build a great business model.
Now, do the Yankees have another one of HIM in the pipeline?
What rLr said in #31. That, and the White Sox dumped Swisher because Ozzie didn't like him. Being able to acquire Nick Swisher for Wilson Betemit is not an example of some kind of "Yankee problem", except to the extent that they were the only team that actually had the rights to Wilson Betemit last offseason.
It was a poor decision on the part of the White Sox. But I'm commenting more on the need to make the decision. Edit: to expand on this. Other teams had to think very carefully about picking up an $8 mil/year salary for a player coming off a terrible year whose team is eager to dump him. That amount of money is starting player money for most teams. If they take on Swisher and it turns out the White Sox were right, it's a big hit. For the Yankees, it simply means that their bench player isn't as good as they hoped.
A similar situation would be Igawa, who the Yankees paid 5/45 (is that right?) for and then shuffled off to AAA after a few bad starts. On other teams, they would have to have given him 2 years or so in the rotation then some time in the bullpen after committing that kind of money.
The White Sox decision to dump Swisher had nothing to do with money. When Ozzie Guillen doesn't like you, Kenny Williams trades you - see Brandon McCarthy and Javier Vasquez. It's Ozzie's biggest weakness as a manager. The Yankees have an enormous revenue and payroll advantage over everyone else. But Nick Swisher is not an example of that. (Igawa, on the other hand, is an excellent example of this)
I think the idea all along was to get Swisher something approaching a full season of ABs, spread out over various positions. He wasn't so much a bench player, in the original conception, as a utility starter.
A similar situation would be Igawa, who the Yankees paid 5/45 (is that right?) for and then shuffled off to AAA after a few bad starts. On other teams, they would have to have given him 2 years or so in the rotation then some time in the bullpen after committing that kind of money.
This is a fair point. Eating Igawa has been a total Yankees salary advantage.
If they really wanted them they should have tried to come up with a better package than what the Yankees offered.
Going back 50 years or so, you never heard people wanting to play for the Yankees. Why, they were just another team. I don't know what it is with these kids and their screwed-up priorities.
Me? I just feel real good for about half of the posters here who can feel justified in their hating. Keep it up, guys.
One big difference between the Yankees of '09 and those of the mid-oughts is that the humongous FA pitching contracts in this round of Yankee spending really paid off, at least this season. CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett instead of Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright is an enormous upgrade. Lucky, smart, who knows, but this time it worked. Maybe the trick is to hire pitchers with intitals as names.
1. A soft cap above which teams pay a luxury tax.
2. A hard cap above which a team may not spend.
3. An increase in the minimum wage for 1-3 year players, making the de facto floor 25*(min salary). The floor can be set so that a team *must* spend all of its MLBAM/revenue sharing money.
4. Decrease the number of years of team control from 6 to 5, which (I think)will depress top-level free agent salaries while keeping the saved money in the hands of the players and not the owners.
5. Drastically reduce the number of rounds in the draft, make non-drafted draft-eligible players free agents, and cap the number of amateur free agents that can be signed by a team in any given year.
Maybe a little lucky with Burnett, but I think Sabathia is just smart. The Pavano contract was gambly (about like Burnett, maybe a little worse), but the commitment to Wright (and it was the rotation spot, more than the money, that was wasted) was insanely stupid. There was no good reason to think he'd be any good. And he wasn't.
What about him? He's already been addressed.
His contract is so bad, addressing it once isn't enough.
In a box, back to Japan.
Kei Igawa, Sterling Hitchcock, Steve Karsay, Jose Contreras...
If you want a floor/cap system for the sake of a floor/cap system, I don't see why you wouldn't just stop at your first two.
If you want a way to increase competitive balance, your 4th and 5th suggestions seem exactly backwards to me. The MLB draft is what solved the first "Yankee problem", and the fact that, as I noted above, free agency typically now doesn't start until players are past their peak means that the best way to acquire talent is still via the draft (and international free-agent signings). If, in fact, players are in general staying productive longer, that would argue for pushing free agency farther back as a way to keep teams from being able to buy championships (not that I think this is at all realistic as something that the MLBPA would ever even consider agreeing to).
It's surprising they didn't sign Gustavo Chacin to a minor league contract.
Sid/Sal, I like your ideas about the cap, but I think I would go the other way on the draft. I think MLB needs to push all talent (HS, college, and international signings) through the draft, with signing bonus determined by slots. This would reduce a whole host of problems that exist with teams "buying" amateur talent (either directly through international signing, or indirectly with late-round signability guys).
The crappy owners are still going to be crappy, and for every team that the floor thrusts into contention, it will hamstring two or three others because they won't want or know how to spend the money. You would need a type of allowance as proposed in #49, and things will soon become so complicated that you will need hours of study to understand what teams are capable of doing, as in the NBA.
What you want is for Selig/owners to actually ensure that new team buyers give a #### about winning. And there's probably no way for this to happen like we wish.
Yeah, you jerks and your middling 95-win standards.
Has the Triumphal Yankee Fan returned? Yay.
Is he so bad that Sergio Mitre and Chad Gaudin are preferable? I wonder now that there's less money left on his deal, will he finally be traded?
Perhaps a floor would be useful if only to keep the poormouth plutocrats from forcing the successful and popular teams from subsidizing their new yachts and private airplanes. A worthy compromise would perhaps be this - if you're on the welfare wagon from the league, you have to meet the salary floor. If you're confident in your baseball acumen and can pay your own way, you can have whatever payroll you want, even a Loria-level one.
I assume you mean three. But yes, you are correct, I tacked on the fourth and fifth to address problems with the draft that are kind of at the periphery of this discussion.
55: Well, reasonable people can disagree. I guess what I'd like to see is an economic analysis of the sundry opinions. As MGL says, an opinion without evidence is just ######## (or something like that). ECA, you've got some free time right? Can you set something up in MATLAB, compile it, and send it to me later this afternoon?
But this having been said, the Rays made a similar move to what the White Sox did last year, trading a young lefty with great stuff to the Angels in an extremely clear salary-cutting move. The Yankees didn't have anything to do with it. There will always be cost-cutting moves and there will always be teams who get unexpected contributions from dumped players. Look around professional sports leagues - I don't think there's a true system that generates actual parity of not only resources but willingness to use those resources.
We already have a floor, and we can increase it by increasing the minimum wage for pre-arb players. Part of the reason for the salary floor is that revenue sharing money ought to be spent on the product, not the profit. Setting the cap around that level and linking it to pre-arb players makes it compulsory to spend Yankee/MLBAM money on players while not requiring owners to spend a crap ton of money on aging free agents. Teams will still be free to trade their vets for prospects if they feel its good for the team/bottom line. But the bottom line ought not be lined by revenue sharing money.
By nature of their revenue advantage, the Yankees will continue to have the ability to spend $100 million more than anyone else and $150 million more than the average team on payroll. This revenue disparity has been growing - the Yankees brought in 175% of the league mean in 2005 and 195% of the league mean in 2008. The Yankees will make even more this year and next because winning the World Series is quite profitable.
As much as I despise the brand, bully for the Yankees for marketing it well and capitalizing on it. It's their money and they should keep it.
But it's simply bad for the sport to allow them convert that brand advantage into a signficant, lasting, and ever-widening talent advantage on the field. Require every team to pay some significant percentage of their revenue into a evenly-shared pool for player payroll, and you can fix the problem without taking any of George's money away or implementing a salary cap.
1. Rest of Caribbean brought into Amateur Draft- It's been said that this is all but a certainty as time goes on, bringing in Mexico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Panama and such into the draft. It's been talked about for years, and the questions is not if but when.
2. Cashman can't keep that job forever. Mariano can't pitch forever. Jeter will regress. Uh... right? Right?
3. Tampa rebounds from this season and once again makes the AL East a three team race. At the very least it would make it harder for the Yankees to get homefield advantages and such.
4. The Orioles or Blue Jays rise from the dead, leading to similar result as number 3. Insert Matt Wieters joke here.
5. Japanese Leagues absorbed by MLB. Not gonna happen
6. Third team in NYC area. How unlikely is this? Number 5 is more likely. Even if you could somehow convince the Yankees to go along with it (unlikely), you'd be unable to convince the Mets. Sorry, Brooklyn.
I don't understand what you're advocating here.
By and large, the Yankees will always be able to afford the best free agents. The "solution" to this problem, then, is to reduce the quality of the best free agents. If the Indians had signed C.C. Sabathia to a long-term contract and the Rangers had done the same with Mark Texeira, then the Yankees wouldn't have been able to add those players to their roster no matter how much money they were willing to spend. I'm not convinced that a "salary floor" is the right way to address this, but the key to controlling the Yankees is to put teams in a position where they want to and can afford to retain their own free agents, and, lo and behold, if the Yankees want to maintain a $200 million payroll, they'll have to do so by paying crazy money to Jose Guillen, Gary Mathews, Jr., and Carl Pavano, because nobody else will be on the market.
I'm sure there are issues that I haven't thought of in the few minutes since Erik posted this, but at first glance, I really like this idea.
My pitch:
Paying talent is shared burden of the league, and this burden is currently being relatively efficiently allocated among the teams in proportion to how much teams benefit from being in the league. With a few exceptions, teams are spending approximately 85% of their net revenue on player payroll.
I believe that a league with a somewhat even distribution of talent (or at least MORE even distribution of talent) creates a better product, so my goal would be to continue to have teams bear the cost of paying talent in proportion to their revenue, but to NOT have talent distributed in the same proportion.
The most extreme way to do that would be to require each team to pay 85% of their net revenue into a league payroll fund, and then pay out that fund evenly to each team so that each team would have exactly the same payroll.
I would advocate setting this number at a lower level (maybe 40-50%), and dividing the resulting fund evenly. This would preserve some of the Yankees financial advantage (since their remaining 35% would be much bigger than everyone else), and it would give teams more flexibility to rebuild with a lower payroll.
This has the effect of being a payroll floor, it doesn't reduce the total amount paid to players, and it doesn't impact any teams individual profit. It just makes the teams more even.
1) Define which teams are elligible: say bottom 10 teams by inherent market size (not current revenue)
2) Define pool: say $250M (I have no idea of the actual number)
3) The $250M is allocated to the 10 elligible teams based on record
#1 $50M, #2 $40M #3 $35M ,#4 $30M #5 $25M #6 $25M #7 $20M #8 $15M #9 $10M #10 0
Now the marginal value of a win for those teams could be quite substantial, and even the worst two teams in the league has an incentive to battle in Sept.
Won't that just accelerate the rate of salary inflation? If certain teams only have to directly bear half the cost of the transaction, won't the players on that team recognize that, and hold out for higher salaries?
Thanks. That makes a certain amount of sense.
One thing that Bill James wrote about the Yankees and free agency about 25 years ago still holds, I think. James said that the best FA strategy, particularly for the big-money teams is to just get the best guy out there--keep it simple. GET Reggie Jackson, even if you already have LH power. DON'T get Dave Collins because you "need speed." This year, Cashman did that, and, as part of Andy's "perfect storm" metaphor, Sabathia and Teixeira also fit the Yankees' needs perfectly.
So, I don't see this year as being terribly symptomatic of a "Yankee Problem" but as I said in March, Bud Selig should have been a closet Yankee fan all year. This team will be a good PR tool for him in his attempt to get a hard cap in baseball before he retires. Not saying he will or should do so--just saying I think he WANTS to make that his last big thing.
Moreover, we can say forever that last place teams should sign guys to long-term deals, but when you stink to high heaven and the one chip you've got can net you multiple prospects, then a trade isn't the dumbest thing in the world, especially if you believe that your chip is going to walk at the end of the season anyways.
But Anaheim and Milwaukee were both places where these guys had only been for half a season and by that point they were half a season away from full free agency. So, it's not surprising that neither of those teams could get "hometown" discounts - they weren't long-term "hometowns" for these guys and the risk of waiting the extra month or two was trivial (and actually, in these cases, are we even talking about waiting at all or were these offers made after the players declared free agency?).
I was thinking more along the lines of the Evan Longoria deal with Tampa Bay - buy out a couple of years of free agency early enough that it's in the player's best interest to do it. Roy Oswalt's Astros' deal or Pujols' last deal, or I think Wright and Reyes's deals with the Mets - there are plenty of examples of players who are willing to give "hometown discounts" for the right deal.
The Yankees didn't steamroll the A's in the playoffs -- they barely survived by the skin of their teeth in both of their LDS victories over the A's.
The point isn't that it was a salary dump though--those are not unique to the Yankees. The point is that the Yankees can afford to take a chance on a Swisher or an Igawa and then stash those guys on the bench or in the minors. In the Kazmir deal you reference, for instance, the Angels gave up a good prospect for him, then put him directly into their rotation and called on him to start game 3 of the ALDS.
I do think your revenue plan is promising. I dont think I'd do it on a dollar-for-dollar basis, though.
Also wanted to mention, I think people are missing one of the big draws of a salary floor: player buy-in. They get assured that for giving up crazy spending by the Yankees and others that they'll get more money from the Marlins and co. Also, I'm not too worried about the opportunity to rebuild. For one, there's less need to have extended rebuilding periods if the range of payrolls is between 60 and 120M. And in such an environment, I'm not sure you want to reward gameplans where teams compete for a year or two, then take a couple off. You wanna rebuild--drop your payroll to 60 mil and be decent then crank it up to 90 when you're trying to win. Don't drop it to 25 and suck crap.
Of course, there's always the danger of signing guys who, into their late 20s and early 30s, start declining quicker than you hoped, but the Yankees can absorb that kind of damage much better than the Indians can. For example, Travis Hafner's contract has been brutal for the Indians, but those dollar figures would be something the Yankees could very easily live with.
Thanks. I was thinking about it some more, and I think it's shockingly practical. If you trade the player, the subsidy ends. That means that your own player is literally more valuable to you than he is on the market. The union would like that it encourages spending on players, and teams would like the "hometown discount" aspect of it; if your fanbase is attached to a player, you can keep him.
I don't think many baseball fans think that Joe Mauer signing with the Twins is bad for the game.
One thing the MLBPA has typically bargained for is guarantees. It would be a dramatic change for them to allow player salaries to fluctuate within an existing contract. Just look at how the deal for Alex Rodriguez that Boston arranged with Texas was prevented from happening by the PA.
Of course, the economic landscape is always changing, and there may be a dramatic change in the leadership style of the MLBPA with the arrival of the new director, Michael Wiener, but on the surface this does not look like an arrangement that the players union would accept.
Even if the MLBPA would accept the proposal, the system doesn't prevent the high-revenue teams from using it to their advantage. Would a guy like Derek Jeter have his salary doubled by the shared money? What about Jason Bay if he re-signs with Boston?
I'm gathering the point would be that if Jeter's market value is 4/$80, it's worth it to the Yankees as they'd only have to pay half of that. If the Yankees are afraid someone would go 4/$85 then they have to address that and go 4/$85.1 or whatever. They wouldn't have to deal with the notion of "well, it only costs you half, so Mr. Jeter wants the $20M you were giving anyway plus the $20M from MLB matching it" and end up making it 4/$160.
I'd probably modify such a scheme to require the signee has either spent X years of his career (or 80% of career service time for younger players)with the team offering the extension, i.e. no subsidy for, say, the Mets trading for Santana and giving him a LTC.
Golden handcuffs! Or neck manacle.
The Yankees didn't steamroll the A's in the playoffs -- they barely survived by the skin of their teeth in both of their LDS victories over the A's.
True enough, but where have the A's been lately while the Yanks were going 9 and 0 against the Twins? The point is that the Yankees are always going to be the elephant in the room, while teams like the A's and Twins have to fight like crabs in the barrel for the final place in the playoffs. If the Yanks screw up royally on big contracts, they're not fatally hurt and they will still usually make the playoffs. But if the A's or Twins screw up even a little, their margin for error isn't nearly big enough to be overcome.
This would make a dramatic difference. Because TB doesn't care how much money MLB kicks in, they could offer $12 million (still a bargain) and Longoria would be insane to sign with any other team.
Then you don't need fiddle with caps/floors/taxes etc. Also the fans that think baseball is better if at least one big payroll team is in the playoffs gets their wish.
Travel and scheduling issues.
Travel and scheduling issues.
Not to mention that you'd kill off most of the best rivalries, which wouldn't be the best of ideas. The NFL did that when it merged with the AFL in the 70's and began to rotate each team's out-of-division opponents, leaving former blood rivals like Baltimore / Washington and Pittsburgh / Philadelphia to meet only once in every three years (now four), and the intensity died out quickly. The NFL has plenty of good reasons for doing it this way, but I doubt if baseball would want to copy them.
If half of all TV money went into a pool and was then redistributed equally, how much would that change the existing picture?
The YES Network alone is worth more money than every team in MLB except the Yankees.
A valuation of the YES Network at $3B would far exceed the team's valuation. And, yes, about two years ago the network was valued around that amount. At the same time, the network had revenue of about $300MM and cash flow approaching $190MM.
As for revenue sharing, though, these numbers are irrelevant. What counts is the arrangement between YES and the Yankees wherein YES pays an annual fee to the team. For the Yankees, this means finding a balance. They can't just give the rights to YES at below-market value, but they don't want to overvalue it either since one-third of local revenues are pooled for revenue sharing purposes. Considering the arrangement the team had prior to the formation of YES — which saw MSG paying about $55MM annually — I'd be surprised if the YES Network pays even $75MM.
I don't know if that matters as much in the eastern part of the country. And I don't know that the rivalries in the AL Central have ever reached the level of Chicago-St. Louis.
So what they should do is give Baltimore, Toronto and Tampa a break, and have them swap places every few years in a rotation with Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minnesota.
In addition, they should reduce the AL East to 4 teams, and make the AL West and AL Central 5 teams each, shifting KC to the west.
That way, only two teams are stuck with the Yankees and Red Sox every year; it is a different 2 teams; and the feeling of hopelessness is evenly shared.
(And the Yankees and Red Sox have both still have plenty of trouble fielding decent back ends of rotations, getting decent bench production and middle relief (Yankees), etc. They're not putting together unbeatable teams, just really good teams.)
I really like that idea. There's nothing magical or particularly interesting about the divisions.
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