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.

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The Phillies, Red Sox, Yankees and the Big Market Blues

This year’s World Series will be the second in a row in which neither the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox nor Philadelphia Phillies will be playing. The 2011 payroll for each of these teams was over $160 million; and in the case of the Yankees, well in excess of that number. No other team spent even $140 million on payroll in 2011. The Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals had the 11th and 13th highest payroll, with each spending between $90-$110 million assembling their pennant winning teams.

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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.

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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.

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Lincoln Mitchell