There is a difference of thought between those who live in Cleveland and those in the rest of the country. The rest of the country apparently believes that there is no way that the Indians won't re-sign C.C. Sabathia. We that live in Cleveland know that there's about a .5% chance that they do re-sign him. If he is willing to take 4 years and $60 million, they'll re-sign him. If he wants a deal within $35 million of Santana (which he'd get on the open market) then they won't.
This is Manny Ramirez and Jim Thome all over again. They both said that they wanted to stay in Cleveland. They both left. C.C. says he wants to stay in Cleveland. He'll either be gone at the All-Star break in a trade, or he'll walk and the Indians will get nothing at the end of the year.There's no way that they'll pay a single player 20-25% of their total payroll. There's too much risk for them to do that. The Yankees can afford to bite a $15-$20 million bullet and still have flexibility to sign other players. If C.C. were to injure himself and the Indians were on the hook for his salary, they'd have no ability to do anything about it. They couldn't afford to replace him with any meaningful impact player. That's truly the difference between a big market and a small market. Big markets can recover from mistakes (see Carl Pavano) and small market teams cannot.
3 comments:
Good post. We'll see how it turns out, but yes, money makes the world go 'round.
I would also like to point out that the biggest movers this offseason have been the Tigers and, perhaps, the Mets. Not the Yankees. The Tigers just overpaid Curtis Granderson and also picked up Dontrelle Willis and Miggy Cabrera. The Mets just WAY overpaid for Johan Santana... and paid so much more than the Yankees would even consider.
If Cashman is still running things after this season, I don't expect the Yanks to go after C.C. Cashman's proving, despite nobody paying attention, that he really seriously intends to rebuild from within going forward. The only reason they have ARod back is b/c of Steinbrenner's sons.
We'll see. Glad baseball is coming back soon.
Me too!
OK, not really.
the problem with this situation is that the indians don't sign guys like this on purpose. as a fan, it hurts to watch all the best players of my lifetime leave cleveland and go to the white sox, yankees and red sox, but at the same time I have to have a little faith in the system. You nail it when you say cleveland simply isn't interested in a big gamble...
i will say, however, that I don't understand signing pronk the way they did...its not really consistant.
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