Cashman Talks About Sabathia & Burnett
Great piece from Kat O’Brien today in Newsday – where she gets Cashman to comment on CC and A.J.
Here are some highlights:
Add Sabathia and Burnett to two-time 19-game winner Chien-Ming Wang (whom the Yankees desperately hope is healthy), Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain, and the Yankees’ rotation looks ready to match up with anyone’s.
“We’ve got four guys we pretty much feel that we can count on [if healthy],” general manager Brian Cashman said in a phone interview.
“I do think that Sabathia’s one of the best pitchers in the game – he’s proved that over the last few years,” Cashman said. “A.J. Burnett led the American League in strikeouts [231]. We know what Wang can do, we know what Andy Pettitte can do, so there’s a little bit of certainty if they’re healthy.
“Last year, we had two starters that we knew what we were getting, Wang and Pettitte. We weren’t sure about [Mike] Mussina and we hoped for more from the two kids [Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy].”
For Cashman, it was less a matter of preferring Sabathia over Santana than the lower cost of obtaining Sabathia, at least in terms of players. It would have cost the Yankees a hefty trade package plus a hefty new contract or contract extension to get Santana. They watched as he went to the Mets, hoping Sabathia would accept their many millions a year later as a free agent. And he did.
“I think they’re very comparable,” Cashman said. “They were going head-to-head in the American League. They’re two of the upper-echelon players in the game, period. That’s why they got the contracts that they got.”
The five-year, $82.5-million signing of Burnett was not as universally lauded as the Sabathia contract, with some even comparing it to the Carl Pavano signing four years ago because of Burnett’s injury history. But the 32-year-old has been almost unhittable at times, particularly against the Yankees. He has won more than 12 games just once in his career, though – when he went 18-10 in 2008.
“That’s a fact,” Cashman said of Burnett’s stints on the disabled list. “He’s a high-risk, high-reward guy. He’s a guy that has had some injuries, but when he is healthy, he’s as tough as they come. It’s a fair thing [to question his signing], but we didn’t blow the market away. The Atlanta Braves were right there with us.”
One factor that weighed in Burnett’s favor was just how badly Yankees players – who hated batting against him – wanted him as a teammate. They wanted Sabathia, too, but that was a no-brainer.
“This is a guy that our players wanted desperately,” Cashman said of Burnett. “They felt that this guy was a difference-maker. Guys kept banging on my door [after] we had Sabathia in the fold – Alex [Rodriguez], Johnny [Damon]. It was a full-court press. You wouldn’t believe the calls I got over him. It was very unusual.”
For Cashman’s sake, Burnett better have some return on that investment. If not, he’ll be another log on the Pavano/Igawa fire…
Well, that’s one way to look at it.
Another way is that he’ll have signed another pitcher that other teams wanted, for terms equivalent to what the market was offering, that just didn’t work out, because the farm didn’t have an alternative ready enough for ownership to tolerate the risk of keeping them in the rotation.