The Yankees are telling everyone who will listen that they aren’t in love with C.J. Wilson, and won’t be falling all over themselves to sign the top free agent pitcher on the market this year, even if they would like to add some starting pitching to the roster. Now they’ve added a bit of action to their words, as the Yankees have reportedly turned down a request for a second meeting with Wilson’s agent at the Winter Meetings. Talk about your hard letdowns.
Most of the reaction to this has made the assumption that this means the Yankees aren’t at all interested in the former Rangers’ ace, but I think that might a little too obvious, as it were. Even if you’re relatively bearish on Wilson’s upside as a “true ace,” it remains the case that a) Wilson is the best available pitcher on the market and is coming off of two very productive seasons with Texas, b) the Yankees could certainly use an influx of talent in their rotation, and, c) the Yankees have money to spend, even Brian Cashman doesn’t want to throw it around willy-nilly. With all of those caveats in mind, I just can’t believe the Yankees would truly be uninterested in Wilson at any price.
But that’s the sticking point here; Wilson’s price. What we know right now is that Wilson and his agent are reportedly still asking for a nine figure contract, and that no one has yet jumped at the opportunity to pay him that much money, even though multiple big market teams, including the Red Sox and Angels, have been linked to him. That suggests to me that the market for Wilson is at an impasse, with Wilson holding out for a mega-contract while teams are presumably looing at him with a smaller deal in mind. To that end, if I may be permitted a bit of tea leaf reading, the Yankees may be a not-so-subtle jab at Wilson’s camp, with the idea of sending the message that it’s time to get serious if they want to negotiate, otherwise the team feels they’re just wasting their time.
I’m not saying that ninja-Cash will swoop in and surprise everyone by signing Wilson in the near future, nor am I really saying the Yankees must have more interest in Wilson than they’re telling everyone they do. But this idea that they don’t have any real interest in the best available pitcher has a distinct flavor reminiscent of “Bubba Crosby is our centerfielder” to me.
Few buzzwords seem to generate as much rancor around baseball as “competitive balance.” Yankee haters love to harp on it to support the idea that the system is unfairly tilted towards the big guys, especially the hated Bronx Bombers. Many Yankee fans, by contrast, like to dismiss it as a plan to unfairly tie down the Yankees while simultaneously giving their money to small market teams. Commissioner Selig and the owners like to talk about “competitive balance” when they really mean “artificially reducing labor costs,” and national commentators like to talk about it in more abstract terms, either lamenting how baseball lacks competitive balance compared to the perfect and pure NFL or defending baseball’s competitive layout.
There’s a lot of nits to pick amongst those groupings, and if you’ve been reading this site regularly since I’ve come on board you’ve probably seen me have a go at most of them, but today I’d like to speak to that subset of Yankee fans that blanches whenever someone utters the phrase, embodied by this post from Brad at TYA. Brad isn’t a fan of “competitive balance,” and appears to fall squarely in the group that thinks efforts to promote it are fundamentally unfair field tilters away from big market teams . Let’s deconstruct this rhetoric a bit:
My biggest problem with the new CBA, and the whole labor negotiation process in sports as it’s been a big part of the recent NFL and NBA news, is the constant talk about “competitive balance” and the strive for parity amongst the teams that has become the new goal in baseball. In my opinion, that goes against everything that sports is supposed to be about and what life is supposed to be about. In professional baseball, the goal is to win. You get more hits, you score more runs, you make more good pitches and good plays in the field, you win the game. You win more games, you make the playoffs. You win in the playoffs and get a championship. It’s similar in life. You use your talents and skill sets to the best of your ability to make a more successful life for yourself, whether it’s a better job, more money, a nice house, a family, whatever.
Some people are bigger than others, faster than others, smarter than others, prettier than others, work harder than others, and some people come from backgrounds and family situations that give them greater opportunity to be successful in life. And in the world there are a bunch of winners and a bunch of losers. It’s harsh, but it’s reality. Baseball is no different. Some teams have better players, better coaches, better scouts, better facilities, and more money and resources to help maximize the opportunity for success for their players as individuals and their organization as a whole. And this constant drive for parity, evening things out so the loser teams can catch up to the winner teams, is flat out unfair to those winner teams.
Okay, so roughly speaking, we have advocacy for a meritocracy, and who can argue for that? The best and brightest should rise to the top, and sports, of all things, should function as a meritocracy, since the notion of competition is inherently embedded in the very endeavor. As abstract points go, this is about as unobjectionable as it gets.
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Guess what everyone? The official Hall of Fame ballot was released yesterday, and that means “argue about the Hall of Fame season” has officially kicked off! Oh stop you’re groaning, there’s worse things in the world like…um…getting randomly kicked in the head.
Anyway, I like arguing about specific candidates much less than I like discussing different outlooks, and the first such topic that inevitably comes up is, you guessed it, how to evaluate known or suspected steroid users. Craig Calcaterra provides the first such rationale, and though I agree with most of his picks, he sadly falls into one of my least favorite logical traps when it comes to this topic:
Here’s my thing on PEDs and the Hall of fame. I don’t totally ignore them. My inclusion of McGwire shows that. However, my exclusion of Rafael Palmiero shows that I do consider it to some extent. Yes, I know it’s not a perfect system, but my approach is (a) if the PED use is established; (b) to determine whether, roughly speaking, the guy was a Hall of Famer even if he never used PEDs. Yes, that’s subjective as hell, but I see it preferable to either assuming a player’s entire record was fraudulent because he took drugs, which would be silly, or alternatively assuming that PEDs had zero impact on his career performance. because we know neither of those things is the case. I give guys like McGwire and Palmiero a discount, and in my mind that slips Palmiero below the Hall of Fame line and doesn’t do the same for McGwire. Have at me.
Well, I won’t lay into you or anything, Craig, because I appreciate the impulse to be nuanced rather than reaching for one size fits all answers to complex questions. However, this particular standard simply strikes me as being far too unscientific for my tastes. How exactly do we define which players would otherwise be Hall of Famers and those who only played at that level because of the use of banned substances? Consider the case before use, comparing Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro.
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The title pretty much says it all, as Mark Feinsand reports that Mariano Rivera will be having surgery today to have polyps removed from his throat. The recovery time is apparently about two weeks, so this shouldn’t affect Mo from a baseball standpoint much at all. Here’s wishing for the best for number 42.
The BBWAA announced their list of 2012 nominees yesterday and while the list is largely forgettable, it is “headlined” by our own Bernie Williams. I don’t think there is anyone here who genuinely believes that Bernie is a lock HOF’er, but I’m reasonably confident that Bernie is on the short list of everyone’s favorite Yankee players over the last 25 years or so. I know he’s on my list.
Bernie was very good for a moderate amount of time, but rarely considered “great”. Considering the era he played in, with the players he played with and against, his overall numbers scream “damn good” but not elite.
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While the internet and niche baseball community has largely focused its attention on the new draft rules included in the new collective bargaining agreement, the biggest news from a more mainstream standpoint (not counting realignment or playoff expansion, which we’ve known was coming for months), is the fact that the union agreed to implement a testing regime for human growth hormone which means that, since the NFL and NFLPA haven’t been able to agree on a process for implementing testing, baseball is quite likely to become the first major sport to test its players for HGH.
Critics will charge that the testing regime is extremely weak and, well, they’re pretty much right. Players will be tested at the beginning of spring training, and then not at all during the season. This means that, since testing won’t be random and HGH doesn’t stay in a person’s system very long, you’d have to be incredibly stupid to get caught under this process. Union head Michael Weiner indicated in an interview with ESPN’s Jayson Stark that the reason for this is simply that the players weren’t comfortable enough with the collection process (HGH testing can only be done by drawing blood) to agree to do it everyday over the course of a baseball season, and I can see where they’re coming from. Weiner did seem to imply that, since testing has already been going on in the minor leagues, that he thinks testing will be expanded in the next round of bargaining as more of the players are familiar with the process and comfortable with it.
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