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RedSoxRooter
12-20-2004, 05:49 PM
$230 Million if they get Randy and Beltran.

http://nytimes.com/2004/12/20/sports/baseball/20chass.html

Wow. Of course I should not be one to complain, as the Sox will probably have the #2 payroll at about $130 million, but damn. That is a lot of money!

Again, I'm not complaining. George can do as she feels. It just astounding.

Yanksin2010
12-20-2004, 05:53 PM
Good forum to put this in. And yeszir wonders why yankee fans always bring up the yanks in threads. :rolleyes:

yeszir
12-20-2004, 06:13 PM
Originally posted by Yanksin2010@Dec 20 2004, 05:53 PM
Good forum to put this in. And yeszir wonders why yankee fans always bring up the yanks in threads. :rolleyes:
But this was in the appropriate forum...no?

Gertie
12-20-2004, 06:14 PM
I moved it. Sorry, should have left a note.

RedSoxRooter
12-20-2004, 06:21 PM
Didn't realise you needed to register to read it. Here's the article...


THOSE of us who do not subscribe to the "Moneyball" approach to baseball, the theories laid out in the book that celebrates Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, have been quick to point to the real strength of the Athletics in recent years, the pitching triumvirate of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito.

And then there was one.

Beane, a talented general manager whatever his philosophy, traded Hudson to the Atlanta Braves last Thursday and 48 hours later traded Mulder to the St. Louis Cardinals. In making those deals, Beane contributed to the likelihood of those teams repeating as division champions.

The Athletics cannot repeat as division champions next season because they didn't win a division championship last season. In fact, they failed to make the playoffs for the first time since the 1999 season.

The Yankees make the playoffs perennially but have not won the World Series since 2000. In the Yankees' world, that kind of failure calls for drastic action, and that's why Randy Johnson is expected to become a member of the Yankees' rotation this week.

The Yankees add Johnson; the Athletics subtract Hudson and Mulder. That's the difference between having an unlimited payroll and a severely restricted payroll. Nobody said baseball economics were fair.

Beane did not trade Hudson and Mulder because he discovered a flaw in the team's makeup. He did not trade Mulder because he staggered to an 0-4 record and a 7.27 earned run average in his last seven starts, dooming the Athletics to their final resting place - one game behind the first-place Anaheim Angels.

Why did Beane shred his vaunted starting rotation?

"We needed to," he said in a telephone interview yesterday.

"We're constantly playing a shell game here," he added. "The status quo was not within our means. We need to be in a situation where our team is getting progressively better, and the status quo could have put us in a position where we'd be worse."

The status quo would have meant holding on to Hudson and Mulder along with Zito. In the past five seasons, the four playoff years and the near miss this year, those three pitchers combined for a 234-119 record, a sparkling .662 winning percentage.

If a team played at that percentage over the course of a season for several seasons, it would produce 107 victories a year and more than a few division championships.

Now look at some other numbers. The Athletics had a payroll of about $58 million this year. They could not keep all of their star players and maintain that payroll. Hudson's salary was $5 million this year and goes to $6.75 million next year. Mulder was at $4.45 million this year and will go to $6.5 million next year. Together, they will escalate from less than $10 million to more than $13 million.

The Yankees could sell a few more hot dogs and keep both pitchers. The Athletics don't have that luxury.

"We couldn't afford the status quo," said Beane, who likes his Yankees counterpart, Brian Cashman, and doesn't begrudge him a dollar. "We were getting into the position where even with the loss of Jermaine Dye, it wasn't within our means. We were beyond our means to keep the status quo."

The Yankees let players leave as free agents, as Oakland did with Dye, and pretended they had to make those moves because of some imaginary budget. They are reminiscent of the story that when Edward Bennett Williams owned the Washington Redskins, he gave George Allen an unlimited budget, then said that Allen had exceeded it.

Beane can be accused of being a bean counter, but he has to keep a calculator handy to make sure his payroll doesn't start with a 6. If Cashman used a calculator, it would have to be one of those fancy nine-figure models. Once Johnson is added to the payroll, the Yankees will have a payroll approaching $210 million, more than 15 percent higher than this year's record payroll.

And that $210 million doesn't cover a complete roster. One name noticeably missing from it is Carlos Beltran, the free-agent outfielder the Yankees covet. If Beltran's agent gets what he wants, $20 million a year, make the Yankees payroll $230 million, nearly 30 percent higher than this year's.

If the Yankees' rotation is Johnson, Mike Mussina, Kevin Brown, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright, the combined 2005 salaries of the starters will be $67 million. That total is more than the 2004 payrolls of 18 of the other 29 teams.

The anticipated Oakland rotation would fall a little short of that total. It doesn't figure to earn much above $6.7 million, let alone $67 million. And Zito's $5.6 million will account for most of it. The other four projected starters - Rich Harden, Danny Haren, Dan Meyer and Joe Blanton - have a combined major league service of two and a half years, with all but Harden less than a year each.

"It's a risky thing, but we've taken risks before," Beane said.

Could any three younger members of the starting corps evolve into Hudson, Mulder and Zito?

"The three guys we had together were pretty historical," Beane said. "If they became half of those guys, they'd be pretty good pitchers. But it's not fair to make that comparison. We had a pretty historical group. Nevertheless, we feel they can be very good big league pitchers."

Yanksin2010
12-20-2004, 06:28 PM
Big Deal. It was going to be above 200 mil sometime. Might as well be this year.

schillingouttheks
12-20-2004, 06:56 PM
yea, y should any of us be surprised?

Joeroafan
12-22-2004, 07:28 AM
Yankees do make more money then any other team in MLb so they can spend that kined of cash. IF the redsox got a biger staduim they may be able to do the same.

oriolesrule5
12-22-2004, 07:51 AM
I think that the Brew-Crew could creep up in attendance they just need to sign the Big-Cat.