Daily Archives: December 11, 2008

Need a center fielder?

According to Pete Abraham, the Yankees may complete a trade that would send Melky Cabrera to the Brewers for Mike Cameron as soon as tomorrow.  I’ve always liked Cameron.  He seems like a good egg, an appealing guy.  Maybe not exactly the same clubhouse stature as Tony Clark, but close.  Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia speak highly of him I know.  He’s getting on in age but he’s a good bet to hit 20-25 homers, whiff 264 times, throw guys out and cover a lot of ground in center field.  

I would not especially miss Melky Cabrera.

Okay, so the Yankees have landed the big fish, with CC Sabathia agreeing to a seven-year deal worth roughly $161 million. Now what? The rumor mill has had them going hard after first Derek Lowe, then A.J. Burnett, with Ben Sheets and Andy Pettitte serving as backup options who could be had with shorter term contracts.

This prompts two questions: Exactly how much money to they have left to spend? and What about the offense?

With regards to the first, let’s do the math on the money coming off last year’s payroll and how much of that has already been spent:

all costs in millions of dollars; *estimated prorated portion of 2008 salary

In addition to the above, the Yankees have four arbitration eligible players. Three of whom had poor 2008 seasons and thus are unlikely to have much negative effect on the bottom line. Those three are Chien-Ming Wang, Brian Bruney, and Melky Cabrera. The last is Xavier Nady. The Yankees paid Nady roughly $1.12 million of his $3.35 million salary last year. Nady would cost the Yankees an extra $2.23 million even without getting a raise and is coming off a career year. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect his salary to exceed $5 million in 2009. To make things simple, I’ll just round down the Yankees net savings in the chart above to $40 million.

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What’s the over/under on the number of words dedicated to Sabathia today?  Anyway, here’s the news:

• Buster Olney of ESPN examines the concerns for C.C. Sabathia as he approaches this new challenge:

Sabathia will get the largest contract ever for a pitcher, Joel Sherman reports, and he is embracing the pressure of going into New York as a savior. That challenge eventually destroyed Chuck Knoblauch and confounded Roger Clemens for most of two seasons. It’s a challenge that still seems to gnaw at Alex Rodriguez.

… Sabathia’s personal puzzle will be to find a way to block out the external pressure and not allow it to compound the internal pressure that he already places on himself, and that pressure is as large as he is. He has been at his worst in the past when he has pushed himself too much — examples include after Bartolo Colon left the Indians and Sabathia wanted to become the ace, and perhaps at the outset of the 2008 season, as he began his free-agent year. The worst thing Sabathia can do is to try harder. But he will be remarkably accountable, owning up to his mistakes quickly and adjusting, and I’d bet that he’ll figure out the emotional puzzle and pitch effectively for the Yankees.

• BP.com’s Jay Jaffe has a thorough (and somewhat sobering) analysis of the Sabathia signing, which ends with this:

The Sabathia signing won’t put the Yankees over the top by itself, particularly given that it now makes Boston the favorite to sign Teixeira to upgrade a more potent offense than the Yanks can muster and that the young and already stocked Rays have frontline starter David Price and even more top prospects still on the way. Sabathia can’t be expected to match the dominance he showed in his Milwaukee stint because the American League, and the AL East in particular—statistically the toughest five-team division of the Wild Card Era—is a more difficult place to pitch; at the very least one can expect his strikeout rate to drop, since he’ll face designated hitters instead of pitchers. His Cleveland numbers are a better guide to his future performance than his Milwaukee ones.

In all, the move makes a splash in New York by putting most of the Yankees’ eggs into one very big basket and by compensating for the type of deal Cashman apparently wishes he’d done last winter. While it may pay off in the short term, it may prevent them from addressing other big needs, and could very well net them bigger headaches down the road.

• Also at BP.com, Joe Sheehan voices a similar concern on the signing and how it impacts the structure of the team:

Despite the perception around the Yankees that pitching was a problem last year, this contract gilds a reasonably attractive lily, making the rotation strong and decreasing the pressure on the bullpen due to Sabathia’s tendency to work deep into games. On the other hand, signing Sabathia puts $23 million a year in a place other than the offense, which was the team’s real problem in ’08 and projects to be something less than dominant in 2009. The Yankees needed a big bat more than they needed a big arm, and while the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive for a team with the Yankees’ money, if signing Sabathia makes it even slightly less likely that the Yankees sign Mark Teixeria, it was probably the wrong move for them.

• Yahoo!Sports is reporting that the Sabathia contract has an opt-out clause after three years.  The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reports that Sabathia’s agent was pushing for an opt-out clause regardless of where C.C. signed.

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