What if the Dodgers Don't Win the Pennant This Year →

The Dodgers are a good team that narrowly missed the World Series last year and has a good chance to get at least that far again, but there are no guarantees and much that could go wrong for the team between now and October. They have become a contender through strong international signings, a farm system that has developed one of the very best players in the game, but most significantly an ability to take on contracts like those of Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez that other teams do not want, and by signing free agents as needed. This is the model that the Yankees began to use after their 1996-2000 run, with mixed results. The Dodgers are employing that same strategy in a much more difficult context. They could get a few breaks and win it all as the Yankees did in 2009, but those eight years from 2001-2008, when the Yankees missed every year and kept spending more money on free agents could well be a more likely scenario for the Dodgers.

Read More Info

Comment

The New Free Agency

One would expect that many teams would be courting Pujols and Fielder, both of whom are likely to remain among the best players around for at least a few more years. The relative lack of interest in both of them indicates quite a bit about the state of baseball economics and salary structures today. As has been the case for many years now, although all teams are free to pursue Pujols and Fielder, there are several small market teams for whom, due to their lack of revenue and payroll limitations, signing a premier free agent is not a realistic hope. It has been a long time since the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals or Minnesota Twins, for example, have made a major splash in the free agent market.

Read More Info

Comment

Another Angle on Verlander's Impact

The AL MVP race is beginning to look very interesting, not just because several players are enjoying excellent seasons, but because these players also represent different ways of viewing the award. There are three distinctive types of candidates among the players who are probably the four strongest candidates. Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista is a possible MVP due to having the best overall numbers in the league despite playing for a team that has not been close to the playoff hunt all season long. Justin Verlander may be the league’s best player this year, without whom the Tigers would not be heading towards the playoffs, but is a starting pitcher and very few starting pitchers win MVP awards. Adrian Gonzalez and Curtis Granderson are both the best players on playoff bound teams, but have numbers that are less impressive than Bautista’s. Thus, voting this year means not only voting for the best player, but making a decision about what the award means.

Read More Info

Comment

Are Long Term Contracts a Luxury Tax?

Long term contracts are unavoidable for big market teams, because in baseball teams still pay for past performance leading players and their agents to still be able to demand long term contracts. In practice this amounts to something of a luxury tax all but guaranteeing that big market teams will overpay for players during the last years of their big contracts. Adding big contracts every year is the cost of trying to compete every season. This tax pushes money to the players and not to the lower payroll teams, but it can be punitive nonetheless. For example, while most small market teams probably wish they could have afforded Rodriguez during his first years with the Yankees, very few will want him during the years 2013-2017 when the Yankees will be paying him more than $110 million while he is in his late thirties and early forties.

Read More Info

Comment

Have the Yankees Gone Soft

If the Yankees are transitioning into a new era-nobody ever says rebuilding in Yankeeland-the Jeter and Rivera signings make little sense, but that seems to be what the Yankees are doing as they look for young players to handle much of the pitching rotation and perhaps some of the catching. In this context, the simplest explanation for resigning Rivera and Jeter, particularly Jeter, for the numbers the Yankees agreed upon is that the Yankees have let sentiment and their own spin override baseball decisions and that they have gone soft.

Read More Info

Comment

Lincoln Mitchell