Goldman: Robinson Cano’s agent switch may doom the Yankees

Goldman has correctly predicted 20 of the last 0 bad Yankee seasons!

If… [Robinson] Cano is insistent on foregoing free agency, maybe the Yankees will get a deal done now instead of next winter, and perhaps they’ll get off (say) five-percent cheaper than they would have had Cano actually solicited outside offers… If that is the bottom line, it’s bad news for the Yankees. Cano is a very good player, albeit one who sometimes seems as if he’s just going through the motions, but he’s also a relatively slow player at the physically demanding position of second base. For the most part, second basemen do not descend from their peak in slow, gentle fashion—they fall off hard. Given Cano’s lack of speed, when he loses half a step, and that’s likely to happen somewhere in the next three or four years, it’s really going to tell.

As long as the Yankees were prepared to keep spending $200 million or more on players, they could survive contracts like [Alex] Rodriguez’s, but as the team’s current lineup suggests, if you’re going to draw the line on payroll but have huge blocks of it tied up in just a few players, your flexibility vanishes. The Yankees have seven players making $15 million or more this season, including Cano. In the absence of a fertile farm yielding above-average, minimum-salary players, you have no ability to cope with injuries, free-agent defections, or players aging out of their value. There is little to do but wait for the contracts to end and hope the farm system can cover the gaps.

The Yankees are in that position now. A second baseman in his thirties is that situation waiting to happen. Cano has been of great value to the Yankees. Albert Pujols was of great value to the Cardinals and Josh Hamilton was of great value to the Rangers, and yet both were willing to move on rather than get stuck with the players’ decline phases. The Yankees shouldn’t be any different in this regard. Being in New York doesn’t make them immune to the realities of player age and injury, and now that they’ve gotten budget-conscious, it doesn’t protect them from their own mistakes, either.

The irony of Cano being represented by [Scott] Boras was that, as much as they might have dreaded dealing with him, had he succeeded in getting Cano to test the market, he might have protected the Yankees from their own self-destructive impulses. Now that he’s gone and Cano has, presumably, more conciliatory representatives in Jay-Z and [Brodie] Van Wagenen, they’re in much deeper trouble.

Agent Scott Boras believes free-agent process is corrupt - MLB News | FOX Sports on MSN

This is one part of the CBA which needs addressing next time around.

Ultimately, if amateur spending caps are deemed necessary by Major League Baseball and the players’ union, Boras would propose a hybrid solution – applying those limits only after the second round. That way, a team losing its top pick could apply its first-round budget to a second-round selection. Part of the reason to do that, Boras said, is to ensure that teams maintain or strengthen their current amateur scouting staffs. His point: Could teams justify investing substantial sums in scouts’ salaries and travel expenses if they aren’t going to actually sign the players those evaluators are watching?

“These clubs are investing $2 million to $3 million per year preparing for the draft,” Boras said. “There needs to be utility for that investment.”

Passan: Scott Boras’ title of ‘Mr. January’ faces stiff challenge from MLB’s new rules on free agency

Mr. January is a nickname bestowed on Boras by owners flabbergasted by his propensity to snag large free-agent deals after New Year’s Day. Boras, long the sport’s villain, is the protagonist in this tussle, because baseball’s new rules governing the draft have destroyed the free-agent market for Adam LaRoche, Kyle Lohse, Michael Bourn and Rafael Soriano – the latter three of whom are Boras clients…

The new draft format included fixed bonus pools for teams based on the previous year’s record; the worst teams would get the most money. A separate rule transformed compensation for free agents who left. Teams would have to offer a player a one-year deal worth the average of the highest-paid 125 players in the major leagues the previous season – about $13.3 million this year. If another team chose to sign one of those players, it would forfeit its first-round draft choice and the bonus-pool money that came with it – unless it was a top 10 pick, in which case it would lose its second-rounder and the accompanying bonus value…

The pool system limits flexibility and creativity, leaving teams even more reticent to plunge into an already-inflated free-agent market when it’s tied to the draft.

“We’d love any of them if we didn’t have to give up our pick and pool money,” one GM said this week, and others have echoed his sentiment, frustrated that two disparate entities commingle in such fashion. Players are even angrier, and agents say they’ve had trouble explaining how stars in the future could be hindered by a rule that MLB promises it did not implement to create a false market…

When Zack Greinke and Anibal Sanchez got get-out-of-jail-free cards because they were traded midseason – only players who spend the whole season with one team are subject to compensation rules – and the interest in Edwin Jackson dwarfs that of Lohse, the system is broken. There’s a chance Mr. January weasels out of it like he has so many other problems. There’s also a chance some of the best players out there have to pull a Ryan Madson and take a one-year deal, and we saw how well that worked out.

Four players flap in the middle of this hurricane, which seems to spin with no end. Per usual, MLB and Scott Boras, the provoked and the provocateur, are in its ugly eye.