You’re rich and you’re famished and you’re eager for something new. You find the fanciest restaurant, order everything on the menu and raise a toast. Problems solved. This is going to cost you, but you knew that when you walked in.
This, again, was the New York Yankees’ approach to the off season. They grew nothing of their own that is likely to help in 2014. They were hungry and loaded with cash, and they gorged on seven free agents. Total bill: $470 million, plus a big tip in luxury taxes.
Masahiro Tanaka, the star Japanese pitcher who reached a contract agreement Wednesday, got the most: $155 million for seven years, although he will surely opt out after four years, as long as he is pitching well. At that price, and at 25 years old, exceptional performance should be a given.
This is what the Yankees do. They understand there is a better and cheaper way; they just cannot execute it. While the Yankees missed the playoffs last fall, the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals reached the World Series with just two players, one per team, on nine-figure contracts. Counting the suspended Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees have six such players.
The Cardinals win with a few stars and a self-sustaining farm system that pumps out impact players every season. The Red Sox won last year with a discount version of the playbook the Yankees are following now.
The Red Sox finished 2012 in utter humiliation, but at least they had several core veterans they could count on: Dustin Pedroia, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz, Jacoby Ellsbury and David Ortiz, who was quickly re-signed. To that group, they added seven free agents.
All seven paid off as the Red Sox hoped, some even better. Koji Uehara got the final strikeout of the World Series and leapt into the arms of catcher David Ross. The other five - Mike Napoli, Shane Victorino, Stephen Drew, Jonny Gomes and Ryan Dempster - joined them in the joyous throng on the Fenway grass.
Rarely do things work out so neatly on the free agent market, where most players are nearing the end of their prime, or past it. Rarer still is that the Red Sox found bargains along the way. The total guarantee for those seven came to just $101.45 million.
The Yankees’ seven, essentially, cost five times that. If their spending is really over, here is the itemized bill after Tanaka; Ellsbury, the center fielder, who the Yankees lured away from the Red Sox, at seven years and $153 million; catcher Brian McCann, five years and $85 million; outfielder Carlos Beltran, three years and $45 million; reliever Matt Thornton, two years and $7 million; infielder Kelly Johnson, one year and $3 million; second baseman Brian Roberts, one year and $2 million. The Yankees also must pay a $20 million posting fee to Tanaka’s Japanese team, the Rakuten Eagles.
“There’s a lot of areas that needed improvement, and I know that ownership has stepped up to allow us to secure a lot of players that should make our fans excited that 2014 is going to be rather different than 2013,” General Manager Brian Cashman said.
He later added, “Hopefully, we’ve pushed ourselves into a level of conversation that we can be included back with some of the better teams in the American League.”
So there it is, the $470 million remedy for a team that had grown stale, suffering in the standings and, most alarmingly, in attendance and television ratings. But, really, the Yankees’ total outlay is closer to $500 million.
The Yankees genuinely wanted to bring their 2014 payroll to less than $189 million, mainly to reset their luxury tax rate and take advantage of a revenue-sharing rebate built into the last collective bargaining agreement. They have long believed there was no reason they had to spend so much while other teams won for far less.
But the 2013 season changed everything. The Yankees were lucky to win 85 games; based on their negative run differential, they should have had a losing season. Even so, it was their worst record since 1992, the year they drafted Derek Jeter, and the regression of their best prospects made things worse.
So now the Yankees will be taxed at 50 percent on the portion of their payroll above $189 million. They will also lose the rebate, which comes to less than they first expected, but still about $7 million. Altogether they could lose more than $30 million, over a few years, by going over the $189 million threshold.
The most pressing issue of the Yankees’ off season was supposed to be retaining their last homegrown star, Robinson Cano. But Seattle’s 10-year, $240 million offer to Cano was so outrageous that the Yankees had to pass. They would not repeat the Rodriguez deal, which was also for 10 years to a player older than 30.
Of course, losing Cano to the Mariners and Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte to retirement is no small thing. Even if David Robertson slides easily into the closer role, the setup options look shaky. Tanaka effectively replaces Pettitte’s 30 starts, but the rest of the rotation is riddled with questions. Cano is a more productive hitter than anyone the Yankees added.
Then again, the reconstructed lineup should score a lot more runs than last year’s injury-ravaged mess, which was so thin in June that Thomas Neal batted fifth in both games of a doubleheader, then never played for the Yankees again. Despite the age of their roster, the Yankees’ luck almost has to be better this season.
Leaving their fortunes to luck, though, is not the Yankees’ way. They have built a business empire on the premise that nothing sells like stars. Well, actually, nothing sells like success, but the easiest way to get it is to buy all the talent you can.
“Clearly, a lot of heavy lifting needed to take place,” Cashman said. “And it has taken place.”
It all amounts to a $500 million gamble. But for the Yankees, as currently constructed at all levels, this may be the only option they had.
Sports, Pages 16 on 01/23/2014