That’s never happened before

Update: Once again, Baggarly is wrong. Thanks to commenter Alex for pointing it out. After escalators, Manny Ramirez was the highest paid player in 2004 and won the World Series. That’s twice now for Baggarly.

Because baseball loves its stats, and because the Elias Sports Bureau keeps every stat imaginable, we often hear off-beat statistical happenings. Player A is hitting .345 in the second half in night games, for instance. We also get historical milestones, such as, Player B was the first Panama-born player to record six straight outs in Game 6 of the World Series. Of the many that surfaced this year regarding the Yankees, one got more airtime than others: no team has won a World Series with a 35-year-old shortstop since 1955. Sure enough, it happened again in 2009.

The 2009 Yankees had another first-time-in-a-long-time milestone as well. According to Andrew Baggarly*, the last time the World Series champions also had the highest paid player in the game was the ‘86 Mets. They had Gary Carter at $2.8 million, less than a tenth of A-Rod’s 2009 salary. All of this is a friendly reminder to not think that just because something hasn’t happened in a while that there’s some causal reason for it.

Hat tip to Pinto for the pointers.

* I will never be able to hear Baggarly’s name and not think back to this report. He ran with an unconfirmed rumor that “Sabathia has declined the Yankees’ six-year, $140 million offer.” While that might have technically been true — Sabathia ended up signing for more — it was just horrible timing on Baggarly’s part. Cashman flew to San Francisco that very night and got to work on Sabathia’s contract.