Every offseason Elias uses an outdated and occasionally laughably inaccurate formulas to rank every player in Major League Baseball, which in turn is used to determine which free agents will return compensation picks in the offseason. Last year Eddie Bajek of Tiger Thoughts successfully reverse engineered the formulas used, and now provides updated rankings throughout the season to MLBTR. Eddie’s latest rankings update can be found here.
Johnny Damon’s strong season has him firmly entrenched as a Type-A free agent while Hideki Matsui is a strong Type-B. The problem is that the Yankees won’t offer either player arbitration because if they accept, they’ll be awarded a raise on their current $13M salaries. Usually you’d expect Scott Boras (Damon’s agent) to reject arbitration, but after getting burned with Jason Varitek last year, I’m not sure he’d run that risk again. For the Yanks, it’s basically the same situation as Bobby Abreu last year. Xavier Nady, a Type-B, is a little different than those two because he’s only making $6.55M this year. If he were to accept arbitration, it’s extremely unlikely he’d earn more than $8-9M next year. Is that risk worth it for a potential sandwich round pick? Possibly.
Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Andy Pettitte, who is currently ranked as a Type-B but is very close to the Type-A threshold. A strong second half could boost him up into Type-A land, and if he does it’ll be interesting to see if the Yanks decide to offer him arbitration. Andy’s base salary is only $5.5M, but incentives are likely to push his earnings north of $10M. Depending on what happens with Chien-Ming Wang and how Andy performs in the second half, if could make for a very interesting decision in the offseason.
Jose Molina and Eric Hinske are the only other Yankees due to be free agents after the season, but neither ranks as a compensation free agent. What do you guys think, will the Yankees offer anyone arbitration, or let them all walk like last year? Talk about that, or whatever else you want in this open thread. The Mets and Astros are playing tonight, in case you need some comic relief. Anything goes, just be nice.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.