Wednesday Rockpile: Division rivals could get crunched by arbitration; O'Dowd denies interest in Wellemeyer

He’s an awfully good pitcher.

The AL Central sucks right now. The AL West has sucked for awhile.

The AL Wild Card has come out of the AL East 6 of the past 10 years, and it’s been either Boston or New York each time. 8 of those 10 years, New York has taken the division, 1 wild card, and then missed the postseason entirely in 2008 – which was just superduper.

The ALC is a crapshoot typically, and the AL West is about to get more interesting, but if you look at the WC standings each year, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Angels are typically 5-10 wins above the next highest WC slot. For the Angels, this speaks to the competition in the AL West the past 5 years, but in the AL East, it’s not as if Toronto has been playing dead or anything, and while Tampa has hardly provided any real competition, they have fielded a better-to-good team since 2007 and still Boston and NY are crushing them.

The idea is that while other teams might make runs at it every year, they have windows of opportunity they need to take advantage of before burning the whole thing down and starting over.

Because the Yankees and Red Sox have the payroll to plug holes, their windows will never really close.

I’m not even saying “TEHY SIGN EVERY1” but look at the Yankees’ offseason – trading for Grandy and Vazquez. Granderson was supposedly not a payroll dump, and really, it’s a smart move, but the Vazquez trade was a salary dump for Atlanta.

The difference is that while other teams make smart moves looking long term, as far as freeing up salary and bringing in a young replacement, the team that can take up that salary that needed to be freed up will get that player for at least a couple of years in their prime or at least the beginning of the downslope.

Holliday is the example I think of, sort of. We got a great return on him, and frankly got lucky that Gonzalez took off the way he did down the stretch, but for most teams that get the young Austin Jackson type in return for their Curtis Granderson, but how long will it take for Austin Jackson to get to Granderson’s level of performance?

Both Holliday and Granderson are bad examples, because we know the circumstances with Holliday and Granderson really wasn’t making that much, but the point is that the Yankees can afford to take on salary that’s on the decline because even with the decline, he’ll still be positively productive.

Therefore, it doesn’t really matter how old the players are, they don’t have to make the wise decision moving forward, because there’ll always be some sort of productive salary dump that a rebuilding team will need to make.

I’ll add that I don’t really hate the Yankees that much (I do hate the Red Sox, but for different reasons than payroll), and I think that the Rockies’ approach to winning (develop young, talented players, sign them through their peak years, trade them for more farm help or let them go before they get really expensive) is a better way to go, so they can spend whatever they want. I’d rather win with Tulo, Ubaldo and Stewart than hired guns like Rodriguez, Sabathia and Teixeira.

is that I don’t think a lot of the mutually beneficial deals for young players buy out a lot of free agency years so the players will be a available, just slightly later….

I really, really do but the Yankees payroll will continue to be around 200 million dollars for the foreseeable future. When players like Posada, Pettite, Jeter, Burnett, and Rivera are off the team, the Yankees will then just have 75-85 million more to spend on other players. While you make a lot of very strong points about the future of the free agent classes, I still don’t think it’s going to alter the Yankees model. There will be fewer good free agents but the Yankees will still get the best players available. It’s the teams that the Yankees outbid like the Mets and the Red Sox that are going to feel the pain from this because that’s where the bottom will drop out of the free agent market. The Yankees will continue to benefit both from signing free agents and from situations like the Javy Vasquez one this offseason where the Braves couldn’t afford the 11.5 million.

As far as the Red Sox go, 2010 will be the closest they have been to the Yankees payroll since 2002. (The Yankees have spent at least 57 million more than the Red Sox during each of the last seven seasons) The reason the Red Sox now have to go out and start spending like the Yankees by signing players like Lackey, Cameron, and Beltre is because their farm system has stopped producing good young players. In 07 the Red Sox saw guys like Lester, Papelbon, Ellsbury, Bucholtz and Pedroia all make contributions to their team. Since then Daniel Bard is the only guy they have produced. Now that they have had almost no good young players coming out of the minors (just like the Yankees) they have to go out and start spending like the Yankees. (It’s important to distinguish 2010 from previous years with the Red Sox because this is a little bit of a game changer for them. Their payroll this year and only this year moves them up a step from the past and closer to the Yankees personal stratosphere.)

And it’s perfectly acceptable to bitch about the Yankees payroll because lately spending lots of money = winning the World Series. (Red Sox 07, Phils 08, and Yankees last year) It was actually earlier in the decade when the Yankees payroll wasn’t quite as out of control and before other big market teams started chasing them that teams like the Marlins and Angels won with small payrolls. (There also a really, really strong correlation to spending money and making the playoffs)

shut up you know what you are