Tim Marchman was one of the many smart people I met at the Winter Meetings in New Orleans and spent hours with hanging out and talking baseball. For those unfamiliar, Marchman writes about baseball in a weekly column for the New York Sun, which is subscription-based in the online realm. He's one of the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to discussing off-the-field topics such as game's labor situation and economics, and can talk your ear off about Marvin Miller. If you don't mind a few days' delay, his writing is now available for free at a politics-and-culture site called The New Partisan. Add this man to your roster of frequent reads.
In the wake of the Alex Rodriguez trade, Marchman's February 17th piece for the Sun calls for another baseball team in the New York market, a common plea from Brooklynites who still feel the nearly half-century-old sting of abandonment. But his motive is based on economics, not nostalgia. Examining the three two-team markets in major-league baseball, he shows how far ahead New York is of Chicago and Los Angeles based on a combination of population, fan interest, and income:
According to the most recent census, the New York metropolitan area is 21,199,865 strong. The figure for Los Angeles is 16,373,645; for Chicago, 9,157,540.
According to a survey performed by Scarborough Research for MLB, 21% of New Yorkers who describe themselves as "very interested" in major-league baseball, as compared with 15% of Los Angelinos and 13% of Chicagoans. According to the most recent figures I was able to find (they're from 1999), per capita income in the New York metropolitan area is $38,539. The figure is $28,050 for Los Angeles and $33,857 for Chicago.
With these numbers it's easy to make a very crude estimate of the potential dollars each team has access to: Figure the number of avid fans in each city, and multiply it by per-capita income... [T]he total income of avid baseball fans in Chicago is around $40 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in Los Angeles is around $69 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in New York is around $172 billion. This means, then, that the Yankees and Mets inhabit a fiscal universe where they are, theoretically, drawing from a resource pool of around $85 billion apiece -- more than four times that available to the two teams in the massive city of Chicago.
Adding a third team to the New York market would reduce the resource pool to $57 billion per team, still an advantage over the other two big cities and hell-and-gone ahead of the rest of MLB, of course. Obvious remedies such as moving the Expos to Brooklyn -- "nothing more than a recognition that there is significantly more demand than supply for baseball in New York, and a correction of that situation," says Marchman -- would be beyond the power of the Yankees and Mets to prevent if the other 28 teams wanted to make that hapen, since the Big Apple teams could only file an anti-trust suit. As we have been constantly reminded every time baseball's labor situation is addressed, MLB enjoys an archaic anti-trust exemption.
Summing it up, Marchman harshly criticizes the non-Yankee teams for their approach when it comes to the luxury tax: "I think that by expressly jury-rigging the most recent collective bargaining agreement against the Yankees, Major League Baseball and the other 29 clubs have lost all moral right to complain about Yankee spending." That sentiment was echoed the other day by none other than the Big Boss Man himself when Red Sox owner John Henry put one in his wheelhouse.
A former limited partner of George Steinbrenner's (which brings to mind one of the all-time great quotes), Henry was allowed to hold his 1% share of the Yankees even as he owned the Florida Marlins, and turned a handsome profit in the millions for finally selling them when he bought the Sox. After the Rodriguez-to-NY deal closed, Henry conveniently saw the light and proclaimed that the Yankees needed to be dealt with. According to the A.P. report, "Henry, whose team failed to obtain Rodriguez from Texas in December, said in an e-mail response to reporters Wednesday that he is changing his mind on whether the sport needs a salary cap 'to deal with a team that has gone so insanely far beyond the resources of all the other teams.'" Apparently, taking on A-Rod's contract is all a matter of whose ox is being gored, and if he couldn't justify the finances of it, nobody else should be able to either.
Predictably, the so-called Evil Emperor struck back as only he could:
We understand that John Henry must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his failure in this transaction," Steinbrenner said. "Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston. It is understandable, but wrong that he would try to deflect the accountability for his mistakes on to others and to a system for which he voted in favor. It is time to get on with life and forget the sour grapes."
Bud Selig put the zipper on both owners for further comment before Henry could offer up another sour glass of whine. But for those of us watching the fray, it's just another round of a good, old-fashioned grudge match scored to the Yankees. Bambino's Curse blogger Edward Cossette referred to the exchange as an "NYC Smackdown" and called Steinbrenner's response "one of the best retorts I've heard in a long time." He also pointed to David Pinto's tart assessment: "Oh boo-hoo. Cowboy up the money, John. Or stop whining and use your sabermetic brilliance to beat this team with a cheaper payroll." Pinto's readers see Henry's response as just part of the payback he owes Budzilla for the Boston bag job. My man Alex Belth calls Henry's words "Bringing A Knife to a Gun Fight" and runs down the writers' reactions in two cities. Fun stuff.
Back to Marchman, who's surely clipped this exchange for his files as he works on a book about Selig. In addition to his own writing, he's also an editor at Ivan R. Dee Publisher, a name I'll be dropping here in the future because they're publishing books by both Will Carroll and Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. I've been granted the honor of previewing and commenting on Will's manuscript for Saving the Pitcher, a task I look forward to undertaking. I'm even in the book -- Will liked my piece on my torn labrum so much that he asked permission to use it, and reported that Dr. Jim Andrews, perhaps the top name sports medicine, really enjoyed my contribution. Wow.
Speaking of the shoulder, yesterday was the three-month mark since surgery, and my physical therapist opined that my shoulder mechanics were "at 95%" and now it's more a matter of slowly building strength. The corner's been turned, so tell Brian Cashman I may be able to get some innings in Columbus by mid-summer in time for the stretch run.
* * *
Speaking of Nate Silver, whose PECOTA system is the foundation of BP's performance predictions, I emailed him Wednesday to ask if, in the wake of the news that Alfonso Soriano lied about his age, he'd had a chance to re-run Sori's numbers. Sori aged from 26 to 28, and since the statistical peak age of a ballplayer is 27, that has a great effect effect on the long-term outlook of this trade; he'll be 30 when it's time to sign his big contract instead of 28, so whoever signs him will likely overpay for the downside of his career. But short-term, according to Nate (who hadn't rerun the prediction yet), it won't make much difference. The 26-28 years are the flat part of the age curve, and there's considerably less variation in the prediction than if he jumped from 22 to 24 or from 33 to 35.
Sori's original weighted mean forecast called for a normalized .295/.349/.533 line, which isn't too shabby (for purposes of comparison, A-Rod's forecast is .299/.398/.604), but now the question becomes whether he's too old to show such improvement in his plate discipline. Optimists point to free swinger Sammy Sosa's latter-day improvement which has coupled with his amazing power run, but he's the exception, not the rule.
One more angle on Soriano-for-Rodriguez worth mentioning is that the two players' stats were dramatically influenced by their home parks. Arlington is a favorable environment for hitters, while Yankee Stadium plays as a pitchers' park, especially for a righty such as Sori. Here's their home-and-away splits over the last three years, conveniently the tenure of both Soriano's stay in the Bronx and Rodriguez's stint in the Lone Star State:
Soriano
.268/.305/.466 with 40 HR at home
.305/.346/.543 with 55 HR on the road
Rodriguez
.333/.416/.666 with 86 HR at home
.278/.375/.564 with 70 HR on the road
Hold the phone, Mabel. Sori's three-year road OPS (.889) is really not that far off from A-Rod's (.939). Rodriguez is still the superior player, of course, but if you can stand next to him and not look ridiculous, that's saying something. For all of the bluster around this deal, what remains to be seen is whether the ratio of the expensive A-Rod's marginal value to marginal contract dollars (box office dollars is another story) is significantly better than that of Soriano, who will likely be making less than half the dinero of A-Rod come his next contract. Years from now, that will be a fascinating analysis to undertake.
If you want to see a fine example of a top-notch blogger taking an old-school newspaper hack to the woodshed, check out Aaron Gleeman's dismantling of L.A. Times hack Bill Plaschke's anti-DePodesta screed*. Plaschke attacks the new Dodger GM for his youthful appearance instead of his advanced ideas (for which he subsitutes derisive terms which reference ten-year old computers -- floppy disk?), drags out age jokes which are older and no more witty than the hot dogs he mentions, and misses the boat entirely when he brings Branch Rickey into the equation. He fails to recognize that long before Billy Beane was a twinkle in his mother's eye, Rickey was the proto-sabermetric GM; the Life Magazine article "Goodbye to Some Old Baseball Ideas" is a touchstone which I've discussed before, and it should be required reading to anybody who thinks that Moneyball or even Bill James materialized out of thin air. Gleeman picks up on this, discusses the Rickey article at length, and then tears Plaschke's lazy, ignorant diatribe apart.
As for Plaschke, it doesn't help his case any that he writes in what I call "autohack mode," the tendency of a certain segment of the sports punditocracy to rely almost solely on single-sentence paragraphs as a method for proclaiming that one's thoughts are so weighty and complex that they require extra space to be absorbed.
It's the mark of a lazy, condescending writer.
Annoying, innit?
I know Plaschke's editors, and sports-page editors in general are at least partly to blame for the proliferation of that style, but really, I don't want to hear the Lupicas of the world railing about how entire college basketball teams can't read and write when from the looks of their Sunday columns, neither can they. Somebody please shoot me if I ever make that a habit.
*the pinch hinter reminds you that bselig/bselig will work there.
It won't take a detective to figure out the valued member of my organization to whom I've delegated the authority to post occasional opinions and take the Movable Type system for a test-drive. But suffice it to say that the separation between what goes on at that blog and what goes on here shall be as rigid as the division of church and state (unless it's a Republican-controlled state, that is...). Unless there's a damn good reason otherwise, what's on there stays there, period. I got into writing about baseball to get out of writing about politics -- you've seen how ugly I get when I write angry -- and unless it's particularly relevant to our discussion, I have no wish to broach that subject here, the preceding potshot aside. So check it out if you dare, avoid it like the plague it if its going to raise your blood pressure, and remember, it's much more fun to argue about baseball.
ESPN's Rob Neyer discusses some of the changes DePodesta might undertake, with a special emphasis on scouting:
The scouting department is likely going to suffer the greatest degree of turnover, because those are typically the people most resistant to change. But eventually DePodesta will have to transform the entire organization, just as Billy Beane did in Oakland and Ricciardi did in Toronto. Everybody has to be looking at the same sheet of music, but when you've been in the game for a while you tend to play your own tune no matter what the conductor's telling you. (That said, DePodesta's got more people to worry about and more tradition to consider, plus he's got a lot more money to play around with, so he might wind up giving a free pass, at least temporarily, to some of the marginal contributors.)
Neyer points out that the CSFB Thought Leader Forum site to which I linked the other day has removed DePodesta's excellent presentation, probably because his new employer is worried about DePo giving away his secrets (um, Frank, many of them are readily available in Moneyball). The Google cache, handy for dumpster-diving in cases like these, is already empty as well (though it still holds a similar DePo-sition here -- props to Old Fishinghat). If anybody saved the contents of the CSFB link, I would be greatly appreciative of an email.
Meanwhile, outgoing GM Dan Evans, who really deserved better, has handled his dismissal in a dignified manager. A frequenter of the team's MLB message board, he passed on an open letter to Dodger fans which echoes what he's said elsewhere. Most notable is his perspective on how the team's ownership situation will affect the on-the-field product in 2004:
Everyone in our baseball decision-making group, including Bob Daly and Bob Graziano, knew that we needed to use the increased flexibility obtained in the Kevin Brown trade to the Yankees to improve our offense, and there is no question that we would have accomplished our goal of acquiring a prolific offensive player in his prime -- without giving up any of our prospects -- had it not been for the circumstances surrounding the ownership transition.
We always took into account the best interests of the Dodgers, both short and long-term, whenever we made a baseball decision. The fans and the organization deserved that. I knew it was our responsibility to make the unpopular decisions which were actually in the best long-term interests of the Dodgers.
It doesn't take too much reading between the lines to see the likes of Vladimir Guerrero in that first paragraph. After all, Nomar Garciaparra or Magglio Ordonez would have cost prospects. (Sigh)...
While I look forward to seeing what DePodesta does as he takes over -- I'm guessing trade of Paul LoDuca and Adrian Beltre and the move of Shawn Green to first base -- I think 2004 has been punted, except for a shot at the Wild Card, and that the Dodgers' moves will be ones that have more to do with the future beyond this season. Elephants in Oakland had a look last week at how DePodesta might use his familiarity with the A's organization to plug some of the holes his new team has. Nothing will shake the earth there, but it might beat watching Joe Thurston wash out.
* Hot on the heels of the Rodriguez deal's approval came a report on WABC-TV that Greg Maddux had agreed to sign with the Yankees. But before baseball fans of the nation start rioting in the streets over Yankee greed and Cubs fans crawl out onto the window ledge to contemplate the unthinkable, consider the following: Scott Boras is Maddux's agent, and this is what he does for a living.
Yankee GM Brian Cashman has denied interest in Maddux, and while that's usually the smoke around the fire, I believe him here. Scott Boras is A-Rod's agent and soon-to-be-Yankee Travis Lee's agent as well as Maddux's, and he's in the business of drumming up interest in his clients, whether that interest is real or perceived. Having spent plenty of time talking to B-Cash on the cellular this weekend, he can create the illusion that some of that discussion was about his high-profile unsigned client. Maddux has been said to be nearing an agreement with the Cubs, but the spectre of Yankee money -- something every agent, particularly Boras, strives to bring into every deal, by the way -- is a surefire way to twist the Cubs' collective nipple into finding another few million in the budget to accommodate the World's Smartest Pitcher. The Cubs have reportedly increased their offer to Maddux to $15 million for two years, but I expect them to raise once more to be sure that they can top Boras' late bluff.
* The baseball world lost one of its most important writers this week, when Lawrence Ritter, author of The Glory of Their Times, passed away on Sunday at the age of 81. First published in 1966, Glory has a pretty decent claim on the title of Best Baseball Book Ever, and if that doesn't move you to doff your lid for a moment in tribute, it bloody well ought to. Ritter didn't get to talk to Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson or Cy Young, but if this book were a ballplayer, it would belong in the select company of those men.
Concerned following Cobb's death in 1961 that stories of baseball's early days were slipping away with each dying ballplayer, Ritter embarked on a five-year, 75,000 mile journey, beating the bushes and thumbing through phone directories to track down old players. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, he sat for hours listening to the tales of the old-timers, whose ranks included Rube Marquard, Sam Crawford, Fred Snodgrass, Joe Wood, and Paul Waner. Twenty-two players' reminiscences filled the original edition, and another four players' tales were added to an expanded addition in 1984. Because of Ritter's efforts, seminal stories of baseball's dusty past live forever in the retellings of those who saw them first-hand. You owe yourself a copy of this book if you don't own one already.
I haven't read mine since high school, but thinking about Ritter the past couple of days prompted me to pull it down off the shelf and peruse its pages, and now I can't put it down. I chose first to read the Babe Herman chapter (one of the '84 additions) because of the special place he holds in my family's history, and was instantly giggling over some of his tales, including the three-men-on-third triple, the one where the third base coach confides that he can't see the ball caroming around the outfield because he's too vain to wear glasses on the field, and the one where Uncle Robbie (Dodger manager Wilbert Robinson) decides his catcher on the ease of spelling his name. Hilarious stuff.
Turning to Fred Snodgrass's chapter, I read about the strange "career" of Charles Victory Faust, something of a mascot for the John McGraw Giants. Faust showed up one day in 1911 and told McGraw that a fortune-teller said if he joined the Giants, they would win the pennant. The superstitious McGraw humored him, let him don a uniform and warm up every day, and even covered his expenses on road trips, though Faust didn't actually get to pitch and wasn't under contract. With him in this capacity, the Giants won the 1911, 1912, and 1913 pennants, and in that final year he appeared in a big-league ballgame, pitching a scoreless inning before dying the following winter of an illness, which foretold the Giants' broken string of pennant.
At least that was Snodgrass' version -- the record shows Faust pitched in two games for two innings and one run, all in 1911, and dying in June 1915, but then that's oral history for you. And the occasional blurry fact to the contrary, The Glory of Their Times is the best oral history the game has ever produced.
The New York Times' George Vescey has a poignant take on the writer's final day, in which he heard about the A-Rod trade and, unable to speak, rendered his verdict: two thumbs up.
The willingness the Yankees have to assume contracts is such a huge advantage over just about every other team in baseball that any hole that develops, they can probably fill. It actually doesn't matter. If George Steinbrenner decides he wants to go out and assume a contract, he can fill a hole, even if Jeter goes down, Soriano, Posada, the Lofton/Williams platoon in centerfield. I honestly think that we may be seeing a perpetual success machine... I now realize money simply isn't going to be an object. With so many teams willing to give up contracts regardless of the talent they get back, the Yankees are in a great position.
Less than two weeks after Joe said that, the Yankees are taking on the biggest contract in professional sports history, that of Alex Rodriguez, who will switch positions and play third base. All it will cost them is one star player, Alfonso Soriano, and a player to be named later, likely an unspectacular minor league pitcher, the withered fruit of a relatively barren farm system. And when it's all said and done, the Yankees will have paid less for the last seven years of A-Rod's contract than the Rangers did for the first three. All while the Red Sox, who spent weeks trying to acquire him this winter, tantalizing their fans, look on.
After working my jaw back into its hinge, where do I start talking about this deal?
Money: If ever a deal showed that trades in professional sports have more to do with exchanging payroll obligations than they do with swapping talent, it's this one. Sheehan was right: the Yanks' willingness and ability to take on contracts separate them from the pack. While it's not a mismatch on the talent front -- clear edge to the Rangers, but not by as much as you'd think -- this deal is a mismatch on the salary front: the Rangers owed $179 million (out of $252 mil overall) over seven years; Soriano is due $5.4 million on a one-year deal and has two more years prior to free agency.
The mismatch is in the money. Or maybe it's the brains behind that money. Texas GM John Hart spun the deal by saying "It's about flexibility. We're trading the best player in the game and we're getting tremendous financial flexibility." What the Rangers are getting is the flexibility to droop their tails even further between their legs while paying $67 million to watch their mistake of a blockbuster signing play ball for a team that probably didn't need the extra help. That's over one third of the contract's remaining value.
For the Rangers', you know, flexibility, the Yanks make out like bandits. Here is the annual salary breakdown between the two teams, in millions:
The Yanks end up paying less money -- 40 percent of the total contract, an average of $16 million a year -- for seven years of A-Rod than the Rangers will for three. The Rangers' cost: $46.7 million per year in uniform, a Texas-sized sum in the annals of the sport's financial history.
What's more, the highest paid player in the history of sports won't even be the highest-paid player on his own team for another six years. Here's a comparison of the major Yankee contracts, including Jeter, Jason Giambi, and Mike Mussina, their biggest other commitments (* denotes club option):
That comes out to a maximum of $70 million for just four players on the 2006 payroll, and $75 million on the 2007 if they pick up Moose's option. As my late grandfather would say, "My aching back."
In terms of what this means for the 2004 Yankee payroll, it isn't much. Soriano's $5.4 million comes off of the books, and you can rest assured Aaron Boone isn't getting his $5.75 million anymore; the Yanks will probably pay him the $900,000 or so they owe him plus a pair of mylar balloons that say "Get Well Soon!" and "Thanks for the Memories!" That alone will raise their payroll about $4.75 million, and probably even less assuming that Tyler Houston's 900K minor-league deal won't pan out, and while you're at it cross Drew Henson's $2.2 mil off of the list. That's down to a less than $2 million dollar increase. But it does push the total dollars of Yankee contract commitments to around $650 million. Yowzah.
Onto the talent portion of our competition...
At the Plate: If one only looked at their triple crown stats, this deal would look like something of a wash, a powerful and speedy leadoff hitter being traded for a powerful middle-of-the-order bopper who's pretty nimble as well. But once you peek under the hood, the differences are apparent. Soriano is pretty decent man with the stick, thought he's got some serious holes in his game, primarily in his inability to draw a walk and a fatal lust for low-and-away. A-Rod? Well, hitters don't get much better than him, period.
The difference between the two is substantial but not staggering; A-Rod is worth about two more wins with the wood than Sori. Looking at the WARP numbers (which include fielding), he had 11.6 WARP1 last year to Sori's 9.2. That's "two and a half wins" to you and me.
Soriano's visible weaknesses at the plate and in the field made for easy scapegoats as the Yanks lost the World Series last year. Joe Torre's inability to resist the temptation to bat him leadoff exposed his flaws all the more, since he couldn't get on base enough to suit the needs of a would-be offensive juggernaut, and by the end of the World Series, that had all placed a ridiculously unfair amount of pressure on a talented if slightly limited player.
Though occasionally the most frustrating, Soriano was the most exciting, electric Yankee to watch over the past two years, and he may well go on to hit 500 home runs and steal 500 bases in the major leagues. Bless him if he does, because he's a fantastic talent, and a good, likeable kid to boot. He deserves to go someplace where he'll be appreciated for what he is rather than scrutinized and scorned for what he isn't. Godspeed you, Alfonso Soriano.
In the Field: Rodriguez's offer to move to third base is the politically correct one, but from coast to coast, it's got statheads snickering in unison. The joke is that Jeter is possibly the worst defensive shortstop in the game, while A-Rod is very good, if not one of the best. Looking at some of the more new-fangled defensive measures:
I won't take the time to explain the methods behind those measures right now, but they're all a hell of a lot more advanced than Fielding Percentage, Range Factor, and Zone Rating, they all have a lot of good thought behind them that's far beyond the simple stuff, and they all say the same thing: Jeter's D stinks like a hyena carcass rotting in the desert sun, while A-Rod's pretty good.
The even more politically correct thing would be for Jeter, the captain of the Yankees, to take one for the team and realize he should be switching positions. While the man is as uncontroversial, well-mannered and team-oriented as anybody in the game, that simply isn't going to happen in 2004. Jeter's pride has its limits, and his past overall performance, role as captain, and lack of time to consider a move buy ought to buy him one year of this arrangement with little griping. Given a full season and a winter to think about it, the situation might change, but hey -- so might the Yankee willingness to send Derek to... well, let's not go there just yet.
The real question for the coming season is what the Yankees do with the hole at second base. While somewhere there's a Yankee fan throwing up his hands in despair like he really does care, it isn't going to matter much. They could run third base coach Luis Sojo, stunt double Enrique Wilson, futilityman Miguel Cairo, or even yours truly out there every day and still win 95-100 games. It wouldn't surprise me to see them give forgotten prospect Erick Almonte a taste of second, but this being the Yankees, they'll probably up the ante and pick up somebody with a little more upside, at least with the leather. Might as well get one glove man in there to field those ground balls.
One option, depending on the results of Boone's surgery and subsequent rehab is to scuttle through the first several months of the season with Your Name Here and then have Boone, who played 19 games at second last year, take over the job when healthy enough. From the standpoint of offense, this might be the best option. Defensively, not so much.
Irony: The Red Sox hopes were crushed last fall by one swing of Aaron Boone's bat. They labored for weeks trying to get Rodriguez in a deal for Manny Ramirez. Because of several factors, the deal fell through. Later Boone tore up his knee and Red Sox Nation uttered a collective Nelson-esque "ha-ha" as the Yanks sifted through the Enrique Wilsons, Tyler Houstons, and Mike Lambs of the world, looking for a third baseman that could take them up to the trading deadline. Boone's injury turned out to be the Sox worst Bucky F-ing Dent nightmare once Rodriguez told the Yanks he'd be willing to play third base.
More Irony: That the deal went down so fast goes to show that being Bud Selig's Public Enemy #1 has its advantages. The spin on the Red Sox foiled A-Rod deal was that the Players' Association wouldn't agree to the way Rodriguez's contract was restructured. But it doesn't take a genius to read between the lines and see that while there were ways of restructuring the contract that met MLBPA's rules, that restructuring would have put the Sox over the luxury tax threshold this year, joining only those big bad bullies from the Bronx. Since Bud had hand-picked the John Henry-Tom Werner-Larry Lucchino ownership group, they were essentially bound by his wishes to stay in line while the so-called Evil Empire broke the bank.
Even More Irony: The deal happened so quickly that the cottage industry of pundits who placed their round-the-clock reportage at the center of the affair were nowhere to be found this time around. Can a blockbuster deal happen without Peter Gammons telling us about it ten times a day? The answer is a resounding "Yes!"
The second base hole left behind by Soriano notwithstanding, there's simply no way of looking at this as anything but a clear and solid win for the Yanks. Faced with a lineup with several question marks from the age/injury standpoint, this trade goes a long way to improve their long-term outlook, giving them at least one star player who's not on the wrong side of 30 yet. Rodriguez is 28, about 13 months younger than Jeter, who's got considerably more question marks attached to his name already.
They're getting a good if not equivalent player in Soriano, but the Rangers are the big losers here. Tom Hicks has shown that hubris is a quarter-billion dollar industry these days. The Red Sox chalk up an "L" as well, as this deal instantly overshadows the legitimate improvements the Red Sox made this offseason (Curt Schilling, Keith Foulke and, um... Pokey Reese?) while giving both their brass and their fan base an uneasy feeling of what might have been in the sport's most heated rivalry. The Mets, who passed up a chance to sign A-Rod three years ago, are forever in the loss column on this one. The Dodgers, who under better ownership would have known a marquee attraction when they saw one, missed the boat as well.
It will be a matter of no small debate in the papers and online as to whether the other 25 major league teams lost here as well. Hands will wring. But one thing is clear: the way the last Collective Bargaining Agreement targeted the Yankees with its luxury tax has done more to exacerbate the so-called problem than it has to solve it. Winning ballclubs make money, especially when they want to win even more. Bud, who knows less about building a winning ballclub than the Butcher of Baghdad, did everything he could to alienate Steinbrenner and the Yanks during the construction of that CBA. He'll offer even more reactionary ideas the next time around -- a 50% Pinstripe tax, perhaps. The other owners might want to think twice about listening to him.
All three are making the switch from Blogger-driven Blogspot domains to Movable Type software, which means you can now leave comments behind. Along with Ruz, Alex Belth, Will Carroll and Mike Carminati, that's a pretty nice lineup of bloggers. Best of luck to everybody in their new digs.
