It’s all about the Benjamins today…

• No sooner had I done my Yankee payroll update than the news about Drew Henson started trickling in. It’s a done deal now; the Yanks have released Henson from his contract, saving themselves $12 million over the next three years for a third baseman who wasn’t even an option when the team stared its sudden roster crisis in the face. Henson showed plenty of power in his tour of the minors, but his inability to master the strike zone or the hot corner made even AAA Columbus a stretch.

The move, which was smoothly and classily handled by both sides– no buyouts, no penalties — allows Henson to pursue his NFL career and chase the two Super Bowl rings earned by former Michigan teammate Tom Brady. Say what you will about the wisdom of the Yanks letting Henson chase his pinstriped dream in the first place; the six-year/$17 million contract was constructed in a way that kept them from real damage:

2001: $1.0M (+$1.0M signing bonus)

2002: $1.0M

2003: $2.0M

2004: $2.2M

2005: $3.8M

2006: $6.0M

I’d say they got off pretty light compared to what’s gonna happen when the rent comes due on the aged Giambi, Posada, Jeter, and Sheffield in 2006 ($64.5 mil right there).

• On the topic of Yankee third basemen, loyal reader John Chu asked about Angels third baseman Troy Glaus, about whom the notorious Phil Rogers floated a ménage à trois trade balloon the other day. Rogers’ deal (which smacks of severely-addled wishcasting) would send Glaus to the Yanks in exchange for B- and C-grade prospects (which describes most Baby Bombers), while the Angels get infielder Jose Valentin and the Sox get Darren Erstad and Jarrod Washburn or two cyborgs resembling them.

Glaus, who hit 88 homers and drew over 200 walks in 2000-2001, is still just 27 (three years younger than Aaron Boone) and he’s a year away from free agency (2004 salary: $9.55 million), but he’s coming off of a rotator cuff tear which wasn’t surgically repaired. The injury, which hurt him both at the plate and the field, ended his season last July. If healthy his offensive metrics compare favorably to Boone:

OPS+: Glaus 118, Boone 103

EQA: Glaus .281, Boone .278 CIN/.261 NYY

BRARP: Glaus +20 in 243 outs, Boone +30 in 445 outs

However, on defense, Boone gets the edge on a less-than-100% Glaus, and even the edge on a healthy one:

FRAA (2003): Boone 13, Glaus -5

Rate2 (from BPro, career normalized rate at 3B, with 100 at average): Boone 107 (seven runs better than average per 100 games), Glaus 100 (average)

It should be noted that since those two monster seasons, Glaus hasn’t fared well; his 2003 line (.248/.343/.464 looks a little too close to his 2002 (.250/.352/.453) for comfort.

Injury Pro Will Carroll tells me that he doesn’t have a recent report on Glaus, but he says that in early January the shoulder was “shaky” and he “wasn’t throwing to first well”. Until Glaus proves himself healthy, for the kind of moolah the Yanks would have to pay, I think he’s a no-go. Valentin’s probably a better and more realistic short-term option, but that’s a story for another day.

• Over the past couple of days, several readers who saw my salary piece on the Yankees pointed me to Dugout Dollars, a blog by Michael Srihari devoted to payroll details — and I mean down to the nitty-gritty — for all 30 teams. Since the MLB Contracts page hasn’t been updated in a few blue moons, this new site is a nice addition to the ranks. Srihari runs separate tabs for each team’s salary-cap… er, luxury-tax calculations (which are based on average annual value, a bullshit way of penalizing the Yankees for backloading several contracts) and actual amounts, adds estimated benefits, and computes total payroll based on these figures. I wonder if he can pull those obscured revenue-sharing figures out of Bud Selig’s ass.

Turning to the Yanks, Srihari and I differ on certain minor details, mainly in how we divvied up the bonus money; MLB Contracts provided details that distinguished lump sums from prorated payments, and I don’t know that Srihari has done the same, but that’s a minor quibble. A more major one is that because he’s porting spreadsheets from Excel, his site is very difficult to see unless you’re using Internet Explorer (which I try to avoid whenever possible). Even in IE, it’s often necessary to view text at a smaller size than your browser’s default. Srihari tells me he’s “moving to something more robust and browser-independent like PHP over MySQL” once the flurry of offseason activity dies down.

• Speaking of the following the Yankees, I’ll call your attention to a relatively new blog called Yankees, Mets, and the Rest which provides some wise(acre) commentary focused primarily on the two New York teams. I’ll give the floor to resident Yank fan Scott: “This may be the most sensible deal any team and player have ever made,” he says about the end of the Henson contract.

• Meanwhile, Scott’s partner in crime, Vinny (who does the Mets), gets points for calling my attention to this Bill Madden piece in the New York Daily News about agent Scott Boras. I had stopped reading Madden last season because I found his frothing at the mouth over Sammy Sosa’s corked bat so over-the-top (“Selig must order X-rays for the four bats… that he donated to the Hall of Fame. And, if it turns out any of those were corked, Sosa should be banned from baseball for life and all his home runs be expunged from the record…”). Give the guy a freakin’ rabies shot already…

But Madden does a nice job of laying the lumber on one of pro sports’ most distasteful characters, pointing out how Boras has cost his high-profile clients big money with his bluster, scaring away good, winning teams that were inclined to sign them to realistic contracts. Note that Greg Maddux is still homeless, that Pudge Rodriguez is going from first to worst by signing a historically disadvantageous deal with a club that threatened all-time infamy last year, that A-Rod languishes in last place as a prisoner of the most lucrative deal ever, and that several more Bore-Ass clients had to grin and bear it when the new economic realities smacked them across the forehead like a two-by-four. Madden also points out that Boras has lost nine out of his last 10 arbitration cases. Talk about consolidating all of your schadenfreude into one low monthly payment.

• I’ve mentioned a couple of new blogs today, and they seem to be poping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm lately. Aaron Gleeman has an insightful look at how the blogosphere has changed in the 18 months since he started, and some of the positives and negatives associated with the phenomenon.

• If you’re like me, you probably spend hours a week looking up the stats of baseball players. Finding which site to go to for which measure is a fine art that can save essential minutes when pulling together a numbers-heavy piece or quickly refuting somebody else’s argument. The boys at Batter’s Box have put together a brilliant, comprehensive survey of the landscape called “The Where’s Where of Baseball Stats” that’s worthy of a permanent bookmark (I’ve already added it to The Roster at left). My only quibble is that they left Retrosheet out of the picture. Where else are you going to get old box scores and historical splits?