Nov
09
The RAB Radio Show: November 9th, 2012
By
The off-season is starting to move along. Qualifying offers have been extended, and the GMs have met for their annual pow-wow. The Yankees haven’t done much, but we’re starting to get a sense of how this off-season will go.
- First up, qualifying offers to Hiroki Kuroda, Nick Swisher, and Rafael Soriano. They’re all expected to decline, which could provide the Yankees with up to three additional picks in the 2013 draft.
- Next is the $189 million situation, which has gotten even more press this week. Mike and I talk about how the Yankees can work to get under that. It doesn’t look good, at least from our vantage points.
- Finally, we talk about the outfield: present and future. There is a lot to like on the farm, but unfortunately those guys look like they’ll help in 2014 at the earliest, with 2015 being more realistic.
Podcast run time 37:23
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I’ve been complaining all this past season that this “austerity” plan or whatever one wishes to call it is unsustainable IF the Yankees intention is to remain an annual contender. To say that it’s a temporary measure never makes sense: a temporary rationality, permitting them to gather themselves together for some future explosion of spending? Not a chance. It would be the beginning of a bad habit.
I was therefore pleased to sense some degree of shared worry on the part of the conversants in the RAB radio show. It’s very hard to do, making this budget work. You both outline the Swisher problem irrefutably: it has the look of a step down in quality. As it will be if they eventually lose Granderson and, God forbid, Cano.
The Yankees have been an annual postseason team for just about every year since the mid-90s, the misses are the exxceptions that prove the rule. To do this requires having a lot of high-priced help. To knuckle under to Selig’s leveling tendencies means they will find it very difficult to maintain this rate of success.
Over time, it’s always a matter of money in baseball. It may be that with changing times the manner of the use of money changes, but it never goes away. It’s always money if a team stays consistently, the key word, at or near the top. Since the early 1920s this has been true of the Yankees, with those two terrible blips in the mid-60s and in the 80s.
In the 20s and early 30s they ploughed their Ruthian bucks back into the team, while the Giants’ ownership lived high off their revenues. In the 30s and 40s the Yankees poured money into the minor leagues (spurred by Branch Rickey’s success), so much so that “Newark” became for Yankee-haters a source of doom and gloom. Of course, Newark floated on money.
Later, free agency permitted George S. to use mlb teams as more or less his private “farm system.” We know that this wasn’t always with success.
All things being equal, better to bring up your own people from within the system. But eventually they become Robinson Cano, and if you’ve decided to be austere, you may find you’ve become the farm system for the Dodgers who can pay him.
The Yankees may learn to be less profligate, but if that happens their fans will have to learn to live with less success. They’ll have to put opaque glass in front of the stand behind home plate, to cover up the empty seats.