Marty Lurie Talks San Francisco Giants Baseball
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How Do You Really Feel about A Rod to the Yankees?

a-rod to the yanks -yuk

jerry f

Not a long comment by Jerry, but one shared by many Red Sox fans. I thought I’d post it anyway to get the ball rolling.
Marty

0 comments

1 Anonymous { 02.15.04 at 4:12 pm }

Marty, I sent a comment about the deal as an article that can just as easily be applied here.
-Mike E.

2 Anonymous { 02.16.04 at 12:12 am }

Reports I have seen show Texas on the hook for paying Rodriguez 140M ( some deferred) for three years service, and the Yankess on the hook to him for approx 120 M for 7 years –so this means that the Yankees are paying less for Alex than they are for Jason, but obviously getting much more ball player – and if the Yankees void Boone’s salary and use it for part of Alex’s, the numbers become even more favorable-and the Yankees are only giving up Soriano, who seemed out of it during last year’s playoffs, and who does not show much upside.

So this is an incredible deal for New York, and a very stupid deal for Texas –they pay Alex around 45 million a year for three last place seasons, get a marginal player in return, and get to watch Alex become the premier figure in the game in its major media market.

When I first heard of this deal, I recalled Bowie Kuhn stopping Finley’s sale of A’s players –Kuhn’s actions were clearly logical from the ” best interests of baseball” angle, although they may have been on shaky legal ground. And I was hoping that Selig would step up and do something as defining as what Kuhn did. But once the story began to emerge, I realized that Alex in New York is far less harmful to the game than is the presence of morons like those in Texas, who are directly responsible for this whole fiasco.

Why penalize Alex and his agents for being brilliant? why penalize the Yankees, who worked with the A Rod team to get this deal done? — they left Seattle for the big money, and ended up in the glamour city of MLB –they have financial as well as artistic success –and Texas is a critically wounded franchise, the laughingstock of professional sports –but Texas also pushed the salary structure to its out of whack scale by their idiotic handling of the whole Alex sequence.

What is still curious to me is how the negotiations went — did Alex and his agents work directly with the Yankees to seal the deal and to leverage against Texas? if they did, the deal may be illegal. But if Texas was at the table all the way through, and Alex and the Yankees were in full disclosure with Hicks and Hart at all times, I don’t see a basis for Selig to stop the transfer.

How this whole thing will work on the field is problematic == Alex is an enormous talent, side by side with Jeter may not work –and the Yankees still have flaws — but wow — with Sheffield and Alex coming in, they just look super

I think they are in Oakland once this season, in a mid week May series –not sure if they play SF this year.

glenpark

3 Anonymous { 02.16.04 at 12:39 am }

One additional thing to remember about superstar contract values. Agents will impose on weak franchises a premium for bringing in a big name talent. The thinking is that such a player is giving up endorsement money by going to a non-championship venue, so a competitive offer from such a team has to contain a premium reimbursement. So when Alex went on the market after his Seatlle contract expired, he was seeing two tiers of offers. Offers from blue chip contending franchises were top of the line, but were in scale with Alex’s peer players. Texas came to him with an absurdly high offer, because he probably had no interest at all in the Texas Rangers unless the dollars were big. And Hicks mentioned that he was signing Alex to spike his media values and the cable package he was selling to advertisers.

I don’t think Alex or Hicks ever intended for the deal to go to term (ten years) in Texas. Each was gambling — Alex felt he could get the big money, and still somehow get himself to a championship team –and Hicks felt he could sign Alex, get a big PR spotlight splash, and then somehow move him onto someone else when the annual payouts on the contract began escalating.

In the end, Alex won because he had the leverage, and he had the Yankees on his side –Hicks never dreamed he would get stuck paying Alex big money to play elsewhere –and in the process Hicks has taken down a franchise in an attractive market, with terrific young position players.

If we want to pass judgment here, it seems to me Alex is the big winner — and the competitive balance of the American League is the big loser, because Hicks made a really bad deal. Don’t blame Boston –they just couldn’t make it work if Hicks wouldn’t take Ramirez — or pay the kind of money the Yankess will be seeing him pay –to their showcase player.

4 Anonymous { 09.17.06 at 12:50 pm }

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