At the risk of starting a flame-war with Russ, it must be observed that the Goldman Sachs of baseball purchased their 27th championship that was delivered last night. This cannot, perhaps, be said of all 27 titles, but it sure can be said of the 2009 edition.
Russ would have you believe that his beloved Yanks are somehow categorically similar to the Red Sox, Mets, Cubs, and so on as teams that spend big to attempt to buy a title. And while he may have a point that the method is somewhat similar, the ability to deliver on the approach is categorically distinct.
Let’s start by examining the 2009 payrolls. The Yankees spend 48% more on payroll than the next closest team. Forty-eight percent. That’s not within some margin of error that makes them pretty much like any other team. That’s vastly, egregiously more spending. You can run any economics model you want and you’ll find that someone who can afford to pay their workers 48% more will blow away the competition. There’s simply no comparison.
And only 7 of the remaining 29 teams spend half of what the Yanks do. Meaning that unless you’re rooting for one of those teams, your club is being outspent by over 100%. Yeah, who wouldn’t quit their job and go work for double wages? Come on.
What this translates to in the baseball world is that any given free agent will go to the Yankees first. Sure, all the top clubs sign big name free agents in addition to what they can get by trades and the farm system. But the top few people, the first few rounds of bidding, are always going to New York. Whoever the Yankees want in a given year, they will sign. Period. It’s like guaranteeing yourself the first-round draft pick every single year, except instead of taking a risk on undeveloped talent that may blossom in a few years, you’re taking people in the prime of their careers.
Never has this been more true than with the 2009 Vampire Squids. The second generation of Steinbrenners got serious and took CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett (apparently cornering the market on pitchers who go by two initials in place of a first name), and Mark Teixeira. The combined salary paid to these three gents in 2009 alone was a whopping $52.4 million, or more than the entire payroll of the Pirates, Padres, and Marlins. And their back-loaded contracts will pay them even more in the future years; the ability to pay even more in later seasons being the real clinching factor in convincing these three men to sign with NYY.
Throw in Alex Rodriguez, moneygrubber extraordinaire, and the total climbs to $85.4 million, which would put the salaries for those four players alone as the 14th highest payroll in baseball, between the Cardinals and the Giants.
You think these guys aren’t responsible for the wins? According to Fan Graphs, leading purveyor of a trendy new sabermetric statistic called WAR (Wins Above Replacement), you can calculate exactly how many wins a player is responsible for. Sabathia scores 6, Teixiera checks in at 5.2, and Burnett comes in at 3.1. That’s 14.3 wins, the difference between going 103-59 as the Yankess did and coming in at 89-73, which would have put them 6 games back of the Red Sox. Throw in Pay-Rod and the total climbs to 19 wins, or enough to keep the Bombers out of the playoffs altogether.
And this, of course, fails to account for the fact that the newly minted Yankees were two-thirds of the playoff rotation. Pitching is what counts in playoff baseball, and Sabathia and Burnett combined to go 4-2 with 56 strikeouts in 10 starts. Try subbing in homegrown Yankees into that rotation and see how quickly the team folds to the Angels, if not the Twins.
And if you think I’m parodying the Yankees’ ability to compete by taking out their 4 best players, keep in mind that the remaining payroll without the new guys and A-Rod would still be making $116 million, which would be the fourth highest payroll in baseball, just behind the Red Sox. So yeah, the difference between a top-level non-Yankee payroll and the actual Yankees is about 19 wins. Money can buy you W’s.
Yes, there may have been glory days when the likes of Paul O’Neill and other Yankee farmhands brought in the gold. Yes, Derek Jeter, most overrated player in baseball history, came up through the New York system. The point here is that 2009 title was bought, plain and simple. Why do you think the Yankees have failed to win a championship over most of this decade? Why do you think the year that they suddenly drop $400 million on their three favorite free agents, they cruise to victory?
At least they haven’t starting buying lobbyists to convince Congress to hamstring other teams. Yet.
