Cashman’s Awful, No-Good, Very Bad Trade

Yeah, _this_ guy.

Last week I began trying to evaluate Brian Cashman as a GM, with full knowledge that this has been discussed on sports talk radio, blogs, and in your office cubicles ad nauseum. I promised that this week we’d examine all of Brian Cashman’s role-player deals, but, uh, there was a lot of holiday shopping to do. And then the Yanks went out and signed Mark Teixeira for $180 million.

So I thought three things in this order: 1) Nick Swisher will be blogging from a corner outfield spot;  2) Anyone who became a Yankee fan within the last decade at age 18 or older deserves a swift kick in the back;  2a) For the last 80 years it has always been thus: Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for i) the Sun, ii) US Steel, iii) Microsoft; 3) God, has Brian Cashman ever made (or needed to make) a trade/domestic free agent signing in which the player received had not yet reached his peak? (Domestic free agent signing = not Alfonso Soriano, Hideki Matsui, etc.)

The Yanks have a lot of payroll money coming off the books in the form of Bobby Abreu, Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, and Carl Pavano, so they’re not spending money above and beyond last year. In the early days of the Depression, without the union and free agency as leverage, owners used the economic climate as a convenient excuse to force ballplayers to take large paycuts – including the Bambino.

If any team is recession-proof, it’s the Yankees with their own network, global brand, and built-in millionaires’ season tickets. And while we’d all rather these lavish contracts going to the labor instead of the Steinbrenners, the whole concentrated excess of the last two weeks feels like, I don’t know, getting into a fight with a drunk octopus who’s been eyeing you at a bar. You know it’s gonna happen, you’re powerless to stop it, and you feel a little sad afterwards.

So as just a little bit of catharsis, I will take an extended look at the deal that Cashman pushed through on February 1^st, 1999, which he’s said before is his biggest transactional regret:

The Yankees trade Mike Lowell to the Florida Marlins, and receive Mark J. Johnson, Ed Yarnall, and Todd Noel.

Amateur Middle Infielders

 I run a fantasy league that’s verrrry deep. It’s a keeper league  in which 14 owners keep 26 players from year to year. In  previous drafts we’ve seen college players go, no problem. In  our inaugural season of 2001, one team picked up South  Carolina pitcher Kip Bouknight, who the previous year had  gone 17-1 with a 2.81 ERA as a junior Gamecock and won the  Golden Spikes award. Gaudy statistics indeed. However,  Bouknight didn’t have great “stuff,” slipped a little in his senior  year at college (despite tying Jeff Brantley for the most wins of  any SEC pitcher ever), and slid to the Rockies in the 13th round  of the 2001 amateur draft, three months after our GM took him  in the 35th round. Bouknight has yet to pitch in the majors.

One round later, however, another GM snatched up Georgia Tech third baseman Mark Teixiera. That worked out significantly better.

Start the clock on Longoria

Hurrah for me as a fantasy player, Evan Longoria got called up.

Boorah for me as a baseball fan, I have no idea how to describe the arbitration clock to my grandchildren. Until now.

There are a couple of things in baseball that are an important part of business and game  strategy decisions (and possibly groundbreaking) but aren’t well understood by the average fan. The antitrust exemption, the positive important rise and negative destructive greed of the union, the notion of a pitcher’s hold (seriously, when somebody can give allow two runs, record just one out, and leave in the middle of the inning, and get a bunch of statistical high fives, there’s something wrong), and salary arbitration.