Why a 200 million-dollar-plus payroll isn’t everything.
Yankees throw good money after bad. photo by Manny Perez
This off-season has been one for the record books as the Yankees expanded their roster, signing three of the four hottest free agents in baseball.
The Yankees proved that having a large bankroll is something to be proud of as they signed pitchers C.C Sabathia and A.J Burnett along with first baseman Mark Teixeira.
It’s not the players who the Yankees have signed that is surprising fans, but rather the amount that they are paying for them.
The Yankees payroll will again topple over 200 million this year, but will that really help their chances of making the playoffs? And more importantly, will it help them win it all?
The answer is NO.
The Yankees will not win the World Series this year and, an even bigger shock to most people, the Yankees won’t even make the playoffs.
Again!
With all the lights on New York this off-season everyone is forgetting about the two teams from the AL-East that made the playoffs last year: the Rays and Red Sox. The Rays and the Red Sox didn’t need to do a whole lot this off-season, but if they needed to do it they did it. The Red Sox signed pitchers John Smoltz and Brad Penny this offseason to add to their already stunning pitching rotation. The Rays also made big moves signing Pat Burrell from the World Champion Phillies, filling a corner outfield position and their only weak spot.
The Yankees did sign some top-notch talent in the off-season but they also lost some very talented players in Jason Giambi, Andy Pettitte, and Mike Mussina. So the Yankees didn’t make themselves all that better, they just traded one star for another star. The signing of A.J Burnett and C.C Sabathia is only slightly better than the combination of Andy Pettitte and Mike Mussina. Last year the original Yankees one-two punch was only four games worse than the new Yankees one-two punch. Even if they had Sabathia and Burnett last year they still would have been four wins short of making the playoffs.
So with a 200 million dollar payroll how can the Yankees not make the playoffs? It’s easy: they had a 200 million dollar plus payroll last year and didn’t make the playoffs. And that will stay the same. To put this amount of money is perspective, you could buy every person in the countries of Spain and Ukraine a hot and spicy McChicken from McDonald’s, and if they’re thirsty too, don’t worry; let’s make it a meal out of it so everyone is getting a small drink too! To make the point that much clearer, with 200 million dollars you could buy four million Hummer H2s fully loaded, which goes for just over fifty thousand dollars. With all those Hummers you could drive a brand new one every day for almost eleven years.
When you look back on the teams that made the playoffs last year and succeeded, they all had one thing in common: they all played as a team and not a group of individuals. The Yankees are a group of individuals, not a team. So they won’t win as a team.
Let’s get something straight: the Yankees are going to win a lot of games but they still won’t be on the same level as the Rays and the Red Sox, because the Rays and Red Sox are teams that play together. So I look forward to the upcoming season and I look forward to the Yankees, with a payroll that is 70 million dollars higher than any other team’s, to do ok. I look forward to a team that spent more money on three players than half the teams in baseball spend on a forty man roster, just so they can find themselves watching the world series next October like the rest of us: at home on their couch.
