Here's Hoping They Bite the Bullet

Lots of free agents signing new contracts this offseason will wind up being overpaid. That's the nature of the free agency beast - competition among bidders makes teams pay well above the market price for the number of wins they expect a given player to actually produce on the field. If they're not overpaying right off they bat, they almost certainly will be by the time a contract expires. Obviously, if teams don't want to overpay, they're not very likely to get the productive players they covet. Granted, some teams get lucky and some teams are smart. Every year there are a few players who wind up having really good years for relative peanuts, and there are certain teams (read: general managers) with a real knack for finding value in players deemed useless by the rest of the league. Teams like the Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets can afford to overpay for their players regularly, which is why they put so many fantastic players in their lineups and rotations every year. Teams like Oakland and Minnesota, for whom overpaying for any one player can drastically limit their options at other positions for several years to come, spend money more wisely each season, but they also win fewer games (usually). I'm not describing anything revolutionary here, but the above concepts and trends have me a little worried about the future of my beloved Yankees.

The Yankees appear to have virtually unlimited funds, which makes me nervous about free agent seasons like this one, in which only a few good players are available and almost all of them are likely to make way, WAY too much money next year and for a whole bunch of years to come. This season, the two guys worrying me the most are Torii Hunter and Andruw Jones, both of whom are pretty good players likely approaching the downside of their careers. Hunter is coming off what many people are calling a career year, while Jones clearly just finished the worst season he's ever had. Trouble is, neither of them are likely to have similar seasons in '08, and that's bad in two different ways. First, Hunter: his 2007 included career highs in total bases, RsBI, doubles, and hits. He's also a 32-year-old center fielder with a career OBP of .324, which is awful. His career high in walks is 50, and he routinely strikes out over 100 times per season. Jones, on the other hand, had a truly miserable '07 campaign, OPS+ing a well-below-average 88 with a fairly pathetic .251 EQA. He'll turn 31 next April, and he's almost certain to put up better numbers in '08, but he's never really been the offensive player that his RsBI's and home run totals might indicate. His career OBP of .342 isn't horrid, but it's a long way from great.

Basically, both these guys make a lot of outs, and while Jones is likely to be better this coming season than last, neither appears to have a particularly sparkling future ahead of them. Melky Cabrera, however, is almost eight years younger than Jones, and seems likely to be a starting outfielder somewhere for a good long while. I don't expect him to become a superstar. In fact I sort of doubt he'll ever be as good as either Jones or Hunter in their primes, but he's basically free for the Yanks, and I'd say there's a good chance he puts up equivalent or superior numbers to both of them sometime soon.

SO - my fear is this: Yankees management views both Hunter and Jones as very expensive upgrades, but since costs apparently matter very little to Big Stein, they decide to go for one of them anyway, locking themselves into the worst years of very expensive guys who get on base way less often than Robinson Cano. Thinking they've suffered a slightly inflated payroll for increased outfield production, they wind up trading away a very serviceable, young, cheap Cabrera, opening up a spot for a slight boost in power and defense in the short run and a very bad, outs-creating, payroll-eating, untradeable, unbenchable "star" in the long run.
I really, really hope that doesn't happen.