The Yankees have broken their own record. In 2007, they spent $218.3 million on their payroll, shattering the 2006 mark of $207.5 million. We can thank Roger Clemens for that one. Meanwhile, the Red Sox came in a far second at $155.4 million. Boston outspent the next closest team by nearly $30 million, and no team has ever spent as much as the Red Sox did to win a World Series. If you tell a Red Sox fan they bought the trophy, that fan’s head will explode.
Youk needs a Slump Buster
Yeah, we all know what a Slump Buster is. Now, Kevin Youkilis is endorsing an energy drink of the same name. The name would work a lot better if it was a Sparks kinda thing.
I wonder if Slump Buster has what plants crave.
Adding a whole new meaning to “Cowboy Up”
Steve notes that Kevin Kennedy said that a colleague of his told Kennedy that he saw a member of the 2004 Red Sox shooting up with a needle full of performance-enhancing drugs. While that’s a lot of “he saids,” it’s also rather damning. Clearly, the Mitchell Report missed one, two or five hundred players.
For the Red Sox fan who has everything
While not nearly as nifty as the dipping set, here’s another great gift idea for the baseball fan in your life: Manny Ramirez’s game-used spandex. Right now, they’re going for $120 on eBay. If that doesn’t float your boat, you can get Terry Francona’s used socks or Kevin Youkilis’ used spandex, which is just a disturbing thought.
Defending the sportswriters from a rabid Schilling
Let’s forget for a few minutes that Curt Schilling is on the Red Sox, and let’s forget his stupid “mystique and aura” comments from 2001. Let’s instead just consider Curt Schilling to be a baseball player with strong opinions who shares those opinions on his blog. Maybe this way, we can have as unbiased a discussion about Curt as is possible on a Yankee blog.
Last week, when the Baseball Writers Association of American first instituted the Curt Schilling Rule which bans players from awards consideration if their contracts feature incentive clauses, I applauded this move. The members of the BBWAA are hardly the least biased folks in the room, and I can’t really blame them. Eight months of traveling with a team and interacting with players on a daily basis will inevitably lead to some soft feelings toward some of the players.
While the BBWAA has disappointingly tabled their resolution pending discussion with MLB and the Players Association, the man for whom the proposal was named — Mr. 38 Pitches himself — was none too happy. In a rather personal and often rambling blog post, Schilling lays into the BBWAA for many of the inconsistencies that bloggers have long noted about their voting patterns. He rails on voters omitting pitchers from MVP ballots or Hall of Fame ballots for petty reasons some years only to include them in others. He wonders why traditional print writers are any more or less qualified to vote than the writers like Buster Olney, Jayson Stark, Rob Neyer and Ken Rosenthal, to name a few, who make their living online.
All in all, Schilling makes some very valid points. But as is often the case with Curt Schilling, there’s rather big but (and it’s not his. Zing!). Schilling takes a very strong exception to BBWAA Secretary Jack O’Connell’s statement. “But the attachment of a bonus to these awards creates a perception that we’re trying to make these guys rich,” O’Connell said. Schilling starts out hot and goes from there:
Give me a break. Don’t get me wrong, 100k, 500k, 1 million dollars is a huge sum of money. But to think that these guys ever approached this as anything other than them being touted as the ‘experts’ on who wins what is crap. Add to that I seriously doubt anyone ever looked at this from a perception standpoint and thought wow, they are making this guy rich. I would disagree.
Curt Schilling may disagree, but let’s look at this from a journalistic standpoint. Curt Schilling’s new contract includes a clause where he needs to draw just one third-place vote to kick in a $1 million bonus. Do you know how many Cy Young Awards have depended upon those third-place votes? I’m leaning toward none.
So what’s from stopping one of Curt’s friends from tossing a throw-away third-place vote his way? Every voter fills out a 1-2-3 ballot, and if Curt ends up with one meager vote, the $1 million is his. That reeks of unethical journalistic behavior right there.
Schilling, in my opinion, has it wrong. This move by the BBWAA isn’t one of their efforts to steal the thunder from the players; it’s an effort to make sure that all of their voting members are following the guidelines of their profession. It’s a sad commentary on the state of journalism than such a move by the BBWAA is necessary, but it isn’t an attempt, as Schilling would have us believe, by the journalists to upstage the players.
In the end, Curt says it best himself. “It only takes 1-2 guys to screw it up and those guys exist in decent numbers,” he writes. The same holds true on the other end as well. In this case, it only takes one guy to kick back a million bucks, and any effort to end that practice should be applauded.
Boston just radiates class
Jacoby Ellsbury wants $125 for his autograph. Ah, the scrappy underdogs strike back.
For Boston, it was about the Yanks, not Johan
With the Winter Meetings over, is it any surprise that Johan Santana is still a member of the Minnesota Twins? Of course not. Not in this day of uber-competitiveness between the Red Sox and the Yankees.
In case you need anymore proof of this sometimes-Cold, sometimes-Hot War, look no further than today’s Providence Journal. In an article on the Santana talks, Sean McAdam admits that, for the Red Sox, it wasn’t really about Johan Santana in Boston as much as it was about Johan Santana not in the Bronx.
With talks with the Twins at an impasse, it has struck some that that was the Red Sox’ primary goal all along. They weren’t so much motivated by obtaining Santana as much as they were ensuring that he didn’t join the Yanks…
So the Red Sox, perfectly content, sit and wait. Particularly with the Yankees on the sideline — for the time being, anyway — the Sox feel no sense of urgency to sweeten their offer and hasten some sort of resolution.
While some Red Sox fans were excited about the prospects of Santana landing in Boston, once the Yanks dropped out, so did Boston’s interest. That’s just the way things work. The Red Sox were willing to push the envelope on the deal to force the Yanks’ hand in regards to Phil Hughes. Once the Yanks didn’t want to go higher, the Sox toned down their negotiations.
Who knows where Johan Santana will end up or when? The Twins seem intent to start the season with him in the rotation despite their status as projected third-place finishers in the AL Central. But then again, we never figured A-Rod would land in the Bronx once the Boston deal fell through.
There’s a long way yet, and this chess game is far from over. But it does seem as though Boston, despite not landing Santana, won round one. Who will win the war though is far from certain.
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