Jon Heyman reports that the Yankees have come to terms with Andruw Jones on an agreement to bring him back for another campaign in pinstripes, which would seem to settle the fourth outfielder question before it was even asked. The deal will pay Jones a salary of $2 million, with the chance to earn another $1.4 million in incentives. Factoring in the all important luxury tax bill and Jones stands to potentially cost the Yankees about $4.76 million next year.
I’m going to be in the minority on this, but I’m not really a fan of bringing Jones back. Jones is a platoon hitter at this stage of his career who’s good against left-handed pitching, but the Yankees as a team are stronger against southpaws, and while Jones was able to provide good value last year thanks to Jorge Posada‘s struggles against lefties, Jesus Montero figures to slot in as the primary DH this year, which should mean less of a chance for Jones to get in the lineup outside of platooning with Brett Gardner in left. I think there are probably better uses for this money than bringing back Jones, especially if the Yankees are on such a tight budget this winter.
It’s Hall of Fame season, and though I’ve mostly tried to avoid the largely pointless arguments over every dumb ballot that comes out (I’m not sure, but I suspect some people recycled the same columns they used last year), I do feel it’s incumbent upon me to do my bloggerly duty and pretend that my opinion on this matters somewhat, so after the jump is the ballot I would cast if I was as privileged as this guy to be trusted with such an important duty.
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For over fifty years sports medicine experts have been in a continual state of trying to find a way to expedite the healing process of an injured athlete, attain better healing, and reduce the chance for re-injury. The New York Post reported within the last month Alex Rodriguez received a treatment in Germany called Orthokine for the injured knee that caused him to miss significant playing time this past summer. This treatment is similar to a one performed in the United States called Platelet-rich plasma therapy or PRP.
A brief history of Platelet-rich plasma therapy or PRP
Platelet-rich Plasma therapy, or PRP, is becoming increasingly popular among professional and amateur athletes.
“The thought with PRP is that by concentrating the patients’ platelets we can get a concentration of their growth factors and really enhance the body’s own healing response,” said Dr. Dennis A. Cardone, Associate Professor of the Department of Orthopedics at New York University’s School of Medicine. “The theory is that by injecting this platelet rich plasma we would be able to enhance the body’s healing response. Certainly in theory and on paper it makes sense.”
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Prospects have become the baseball equivalent of backup quarterbacks. By and large we all have a fairly outsized view of their talents, and tend to forget the inherent limitations that come with their very billing. Just like a backup quarterback is a reserve because no one wants to give them a starting job, prospects are young unproven tickets who are anything but guaranteed to have solid big league careers, let alone be an All-Star or Hall of Fame caliber player. And yet, just as fans of struggling football teams will always tend to see the warts in their starting quarterback while focusing on the positive qualities of the backups (or just plain overestimate the backup’s talents), baseball fans seem to increasingly view their team’s top prospects through the prism of that player’s ceiling, while failing to realize how unlikely it is that those prospects will ever live up to their billing.
Consider Phil Hughes. Once upon a time a 21 year old Hughes was rated as the fourth best prospect in all of baseball by Baseball America, and with good reason. The previous year a 20 year old Hughes had struck out 10.7 batters per nine innings with a 4.31 strikeout to walk ratio in 116 Double-A innings. Those are tremendous numbers for any prospect, let alone someone so young for the level of competition. Add into the mix that Hughes was seen as having very good secondary pitches for someone his age, and he downright screamed “future ace.”
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According to the New York Post, Alex Rodriguez recently traveled to Germany to have an experimental procedure done on his troublesome right knee on the recommendation of Kobe Bryant. The procedure, called Orthokine, is a blood spinning therapy that apparently works in reducing inflammation and thus pain, though according to the experts in the Post’s story it’s not known if the procedure has any larger effects. The procedure doesn’t involve much rehab time, so Alex should be ready when Spring Training opens. Personally I’m all for anything that help keeps A-Rod limber and healthy this year.
According to the story, A-Rod cleared the procedure with the Yankees and the commissioner’s office before going to Germany, so you don’t have to worry about any Colon-esque hand wringing over this.
Thinking a little bit more about the Yankees’ sudden aversion to the luxury tax this morning, another thought hit me, this time about the sheer irrationality of the Yankees’ position as related by Matthews.
The general premise goes like this: Hiroki Kuroda will cost about $12 million to sign, but since the Yankees will have to pay a luxury tax bill next year, the “real” cost of signing Kuroda would be roughly $17 million, or the cost of his salary plus the bump to the tax bill. That’s pretty straight-forward, and it’s also a really foolish way to conceptualize the imposition of the tax. Why? Because the Yankees aren’t being taxed on the acquisition of Kuroda, but on the cost of the payroll as a whole. To that end, the best way to view the cost of the tax is to spread the cost evenly between each player on the roster and add that number to everyone’s salary.
This is obviously a more logical method of accounting, since it accounts for everyone’s share of the tax bill and, by extension, their share of the luxury tax bill. Using the method the Yankees are describing doesn’t work well at all, because it can be arranged in a wholly arbitrary manner, namely by where you start adding up everyone’s salary. Taken quite literally, if I added up every player’s salary and started with Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, A.J. Burnett, and Rafael Soriano you could technically claim that those salaries are tax free, since I haven’t crossed the luxury tax threshold yet. That wouldn’t make a lick of sense.
Of course, if you use my method, the marginal cost of the tax increase is very small, and the value of each player’s contract doesn’t change much, if at all. That, I would argue, should be rather plain: considering that the Yankees’ payroll will be roughly $200 million this year, an extra $5 million in a luxury tax bill comes out to about 2.5% of that figure, a relatively inconsequential number. And rather than distort the “value” of individuals on the roster in obviously ridiculous ways, this method leaves you with a much more sound view of the team’s financial state: some players are reasonably priced, others are great bargains, and others, most notably Alex Rodriguez and Rafael Soriano, are being drastically overpaid.
Hal and Hank made their own bed with those two contracts, needlessly throwing away money against the advice of their general manager. Now they’re trying to claw back those costs at the expense of the baseball team. That’s their right as owners, to be sure, but there’s no reason to pretend that isn’t what’s going on. And there’s certainly no reason for anyone to delude themselves into the belief that the Yankees’ rotation as it stands is solid enough to forgo an upgrade on the merits.
If you were looking for a brief yet comprehensive account of what’s going on with the Yankees these days, you could do worse than this report from Wally Matthews on the Yankees’ lack of interest in Hiroki Kuroda. Long story short, they “don’t have the money.” Of course, they do have the money, because they’re the freaking Yankees. They just don’t want to spend the money, mostly because they don’t want to continue paying high luxury tax bills, and Kuroda would add about $5 million to their tab next season.
It’s a fine excuse in its own right, and as a long term strategy it will certainly do the organization good to minimize the amount of dead weight spending on the books, but as a short-term strategy it’s rather strange. After all, for all the talk about budgets and wanting to be more fiscally responsible since the Steinbrenner kids took over the team, especially from Hal, the brothers have not been shy at all to spend money on payroll, even when the “baseball people” wanted to exercise some more prudence. Hal and Hank tripped all over themselves to throw money at Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada when Brian Cashman wanted to wait out their asking prices in 2007, and then paid Derek Jeter much more than they had to just because he’s Derek Jeter last winter before famously bigfooting Cashman to sign Rafael Soriano to an absurdly player-friendly contract even though they had no need for an additional reliever. Three of those contracts are on the books and, assuming Jeter exercises his player option for the 2014 season, they account for a combined average annual value of roughly $54 million, not counting any bonus money they may make.
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The Washington Nationals had been rumored to have a strong desire to acquire Gio Gonzalez from the A’s, and though Oakland had been asking for quite a high price in exchange for their young lefty, the Nationals decided to pay the price. Washington will send four of their top ten prospects to Oakland in exchange for Gonzalez, who will join Jordan Zimmerman and Stephen Strasburg in the Nationals’ rotation, and eliminate another name the Yankees have supposedly been interested in acquiring.
I’m not really a big believer in Gonzalez because of his walk rates, and probably wouldn’t have even entertained the idea of trading Jesus Montero or Manny Banuelos for him, but it’s a timely reminder that pitching is getting really expensive these days (or that prospects aren’t as valuable as some people think, if you want to look at it that way). Mat Latos fetched four pieces from the Reds, Gio Gonzalez returned four top prospects from Washington, and when Chicago couldn’t get the kind of package they wanted in exchange for John Danks, they decided they’d rather keep him around and give him $65 million than trade him for a lesser package.
One year of Roy Oswalt sounds better and better with each passing day.
I can’t even… (EDIT: emphasis mine)
It is about the money.
The Yankees are still unlikely to do anything major this offseason unless they can unload some money, a baseball official with knowledge of their plans. So even though they like Hiroki Kuroda a lot, Yankees GM Brian Cashman does not have the cash to spend on the righty starter. Kuroda figures to receive at least $12 million on a one-year deal.
Feeling they have five starters in CC Sabathia, Ivan Nova, Phil Hughes, A.J. Burnett and Freddy Garcia, that is not in Cashman’s budget. The Yankees already have commitments that will put their 2012 payroll in the $185-$200M range.
I’m out of different ways to try to be clever about this, so I’ll just lay it out there and be done with it until after Christmas: this is a bunch of bunk. The Yankees have the money, they just don’t want to spend it. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the money is being pocketed, maybe Brian Cashman is stubbornly insisting he has so put a really good rotation together already. Whatever the case, it is what it is. Unless the Yankees are putting up a completely false facade in their public statements now, no pitching upgrades are on the way.
I don’t particularly care for the faith someone has in this current group of starters, but that’s a mere difference in opinion, I guess. What I do very much care about is the fact that Brian Cashman talked endlessly about his desire to upgrade the pitching staff, even though he now appears to have had no such intention.
Baseball America is scheduled to release their list of the top ten prospect in the Yankees’ organization January 4th, but the list is in the latest copy of the print edition, and multiple people have “leaked” the list online. Here’s how BA ranks the Yankees’ system:
1. Jesus Montero-C/DH
2. Manny Banuelos-LHP
3. Dellin Betances- RHP
4. Gary Sanchez- C
5. Mason Williams- OF
6. Dante Bichette Jr.- 3B
7. Ravel Santana- OF
8. Austin Romine- C
9. J.R. Murphy- C/3B
10. Slade Heathcott- OF
It’s worth keeping in mind that different evaluators will favor different factors when putting these lists together, and that can cause a seemingly large variance where there isn’t necessarily a lot of difference there. BA is obviously favoring projectable toolsy players with higher ceilings to “safer” prospects with smaller upsides, which is why Williams, Bichette, and Santana occupy the middle of the list despite not having a single appearance at a full season level between them while David Phelps and Adam Warren don’t make the top ten at all. Someone with a larger preference for high-floor players ready for the big leagues (like me) would probably have a much different looking list even working with the same information.
Other than that, there are only a few notable observations just from the list. Sanchez really wasn’t dinged at all by his up-and-down 2011 season, and BA apparently still loves his bat, Slade Heathcott is still impressing everyone with his upside, and, perhaps most obviously of all, 2010 first round pick Cito Culver is a rather glaring omission from the list, given the inclusion of so many other lower prospects.
If you had your heart set on the Yankees signing John Danks next winter, you can put those dreams to bed, as it’s been reported tonight that Chicago has signed the left hander to a five year $65 million extension. Danks was an intriguing target this winter, and the White Sox were shopping him around for a while, but by most accounts they were asking for far too much in return (they supposedly wanted two of Jesus Montero, Dellin Betances, and Manny Banuelos from the Yankees), for a non-elite pitcher with only a year left until free agency. Apparently they couldn’t get an offer they liked, and decided to keep Danks around for the long term instead. Considering he’s just coming into his prime and the terms of the contract are very reasonable, it’s not a bad decision by any means.
I don’t think this tells us much of anything about what the rest of the winter holds for the Yankees; as I said above the White Sox wanted too steep of a price for Danks, so the Yankees really didn’t get a chance to acquire the southpaw, but it is a reminder that what looks like a juicy class of free agent pitchers next winter will probably look a lot leaner by the time November rolls around again. If you’re hoping the Yankees are merely being quiet this winter in order to make a splash next year (not that a one year deal for Hiroki Kuroda would affect that at all, but I digress), you may be unpleasantly surprised when you see what the market actually bears in 2012.
With the flurry of the Winter Meetings feeling like a distant memory, many baseball writers have shifted their attention away from the hot stove league (albeit temporarily) to writing articles about the upcoming Hall of Fame vote. As with nearly every election, there always seems to be a bit of controversy surrounding certain candidates. Several BBWAA members will steadfastly throw their support behind a specific candidate, while the sabermetric community will write numerous articles providing myriad reasons why said candidate should not be elected and vice-versa.
While this back and forth exchange of rhetoric can sometimes be a little overwhelming, the overall net gain is positive. Even though their performance doesn’t change during their period of eligibility, the candidates are re-examined and re-evaluated; minds are changed; and cases become more clear. In a way, it’s somewhat of a learning process. Mistakes are certainly made along the way with certain players getting elected that probably shouldn’t have (Jim Rice, Bruce Sutter, Tony Perez), and others have been criminally left out in the cold despite carrying credentials that are more than adequate (Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Dick Allen). For the most part tough, the electorate has done a good job in selecting their inductees; albeit occasionally tardy with some.
To kick off the Hall of Fame season, I thought I’d share my theoretical Hall of Fame ballot. I will follow the BBWAA’s criteria to the letter with the exception of the character clause. I’ll be ignoring that one entirely. With the number of unsavory characters already in the Hall of Fame, it seems incredibly silly to invoke it now for the purposes of passing moral judgment on known and especially suspected (but not proven) steroid users. Since I can’t state with any certainty the degree to which steroids enhanced a player’s production, it’s difficult to penalize them accordingly. Furthermore, there isn’t a great way to determine who did and did not do steroids without test results. As a result, I won’t be making any assumptions.
After much consideration, I’ve decided on “voting” for six candidates from the current pool of 27 eligible players. No one of the incoming class was selected from my ballot.
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