Steve Lombardi wrote:

@ Raf: Well, if you take out Wang’s stats, it looks like the pitching has improved this year.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

@ Raf: Well, if you take out Wang’s stats, it looks like the pitching has improved this year.

@ bfriley76: We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?

Steve Lombardi wrote:

@ YankCrank: OK, how’s this: Let’s see him build JUST ONE team – that’s not seeded with players from a previous GM – that goes on to win a World Series with a payroll of $150 million or less. If he did that, I would be impressed.
Because, right now, all I see from Cashman is $200 million teams who either get their ass kicked in the ALDS or that don’t make the ALDS at all…

Beautiful. So you want him to run the team into the ground so he can rebuild it? So he doesn’t get credit for having a $200M team that makes the playoffs, but gets slagged for having a $200M team that misses the playoffs… Yep, I can see where that’s perfectly fair. Makes a whole lot of sense.

Jeter’s a bum, Mo’s a bum, Posada’s a bum, Cashman is an idiot for keeping them around and paying them what they’re worth.

C’mon, man, you can do better than that. Especially when the column that Madden wrote s inaccurate. THE PITCHING IS PERFORMING THE SAME AS LAST YEAR, THE OFFENSE HAS IMPROVED FROM LAST YEAR. That’s why the Yanks are doing better than they did last year. It not the players holding hands singing kumbayaa, it isn’t AJ’s pies, it isn’t karma, mystique, or whatever. It’s the Yanks running a lineup in 2009 that isn’t 4 hitters short like it was in 2008.

Steve…let me ask you a question. If I’m reading these comments correctly, you’re probably unwilling to give Cashman credit if the Yankees win the World Series this year…which is your prerogative. But, since he, in your words, “acquired the best talent on the free agent market” which subsequently lead the team to the best record in baseball, if the Yankees DON’T win the World Series, will you blame him?

Garcia wrote:

I could have swore I remember reading, that in order for Steve to respect Cashman then he has to win a championship. Now he needs to win with a 150 million dollar payroll. I see!

Ooooh I remember that too.

I could have swore I remember reading, that in order for Steve to respect Cashman then he has to win a championship. Now he needs to win with a 150 million dollar payroll. I see!

Steve Lombardi wrote:

Say you owned your own company and you hired a manager to run it. Let’s call him Ryan Creditgal…for this example.
Now, when you first hired Ryan, you micro-managed him – even ‘tho he was being paid to run the show. And, after 8 years of this, Creditgal comes to you and says “Let me do my job. I want to be the head cheese, etc.”
So, you figure WTF and you cut the strings.
Over the next three years, good ol’ Ryan Creditgal makes mistake after mistake. When he tries to be proactive and have contingency plans, the plans are a bust and fail. When he’s aggressive and makes a call on something real time, it usually blows up. And, worst, when it comes to the most important element in the nature of your business, he demonstrates that he’s clueless in identifying the right guys for the job.

First of all, over these 3 years, it HASN’T been mistake after mistake. In 2006-7 he traded for Abreu, cleared the againg malcontents off the team and brought back Pettitte. Johnson turned into Ohlendorf (who NEVER would’ve been allowed to develop in the Yankee rotation) and who became part of Nady and Marte. In 2007, he dumped Proctor just as he was breaking down for Betemit, and traded a AA reliever for Molina. In the 2007-8 offseason, he signed Aceves from the Mexican League, and traded Clippard for Albaledejo. In 2008, he traded Alberto Gonazlez for Jhonny Nunez, who became part of another deal. He traded for Nady and Marte. He traded Betemit and Nunez for Swisher. He deliberately let players of some proven quality go, to free room under the team’s self-imposed salary cap to sign even better players to replace them.

In three years, your company goes from being one of the best in the field to being one that’s outside looking in at the best.

Selective endpoint logic. The contract of old and declining players had to be allowed to finish so that roster space and money could be freed up to replace them with better players.

So, at this point, good ol’ Ryan Creditgal comes to you and says “We’re in a bad spot. We have serious holes and issues that have come up and we don’t have an internal answers. We need to get help from outside. But, it’s going to cost us – and cost us a LOT of money.”

And this is different from the Martinez/Nelson, Cone, Clemens and Knobluach trades, and the Wells, Key, El Duque and Stamton signings, exactly how?

Now, you don’t want you company to fail, so, you give the kid your checkbook. With that, he goes out and buys the best and most expensive talent from other companies. It’s really no-brainer stuff…since these guys have awesome resumes, etc. But, it’s REALLY expensive.

You mean like Giambi, Sheffield signings and the Johnson and A-Rod trades were no brainers? You mean like the Hunter, Gullett, Gossage, Jackson signings that put the first Boss dynasty over the top were no-brainers?

Well, the new guys come in and save the company.
I dunno about you, but, if this is my company, I’m not ready to give Creditgal a huge bonus for saving the company. It was his failures that put the company in a bad spot. It was his inability to do his job that brought cause for the need to go out and spend a ton on hired guns.

No, it was the franchise’s relative postion in the rebuilding cycle combined with the organization’s philosophy that absolutely refuses to ever seriously rebuild that put the company in a bad spot.

The Yankees won 4 titles in 5 years. The core guys were in their prime. It made perfectly good sense to try to squeeze out another title or two from them by surrounding them with other good players. The organization would not risk young players, nor was the farm producing them. But by re-signing the core, and bringing in veteran players of roughly the same age, the Yankees were creating a situation where, year-by-year they were slowly declining from championship level play. It showed up first in the defense, then the pitching, and finally, last season, in the offense.

Other organizations are going to school on what you accomplished, they’re ready, and they’re able; so that when you slip a little, year by year, (and that’s what declining from 103 wins to 98 wins to 95 wins to 89 wins is), they step through the door and slam it behind you. For one season. Tough noogies on you.

So you let the old players go. You now have $70 million to play with under your self-imposed cap. What the frig are you supposed to do? Not buy the best players on the market? Trade good prospects for the 7th best players at each position requirement, so that if it works, you can proclaim your own geniusitude and if it doesn’t, you can say, “well, I kept the payroll down, boss”?

If it’s your company and this all went down, and you then want to give good ol’ Ryan Creditgal the keys to the executive washroom, a company car, and two extra weeks vacation, well, that’s your right. But, if you did that, I doubt that I want to buy any stock in your company, for sure.

…and the most significant criticism of this entire analogy is that baseball teams are not run under the same criteria of success and failure as Fortune 500 corporations. One or two titles in a 5-to-8 year period is a wild success, because only 1 of 30 teams can win in any given year. In a good economy, nearly every major corporation will turn major profits and be successful.

Just because the Yanks have won 26 titles, just because they won 4 out of 5, just because the have the top payroll and the top ticket prices does not entitle anyone to expect them to win every year, a majority of the years, or even a high minority of the years. It might be a mission statement, but that’s a goal, like the Pledge of Allegiance, but probably won’t be reality, not exactly. Not that you stop striving for the goal, but at the same time, if you don’t reach it, you don’t tear it apart and kick the thing into the trashbin.

The 4 out of 5 Dynasty was built around 5 great players that the system kicked out within 3-4 years of each other, 4 of them in 1995 alone. 2 sure Hall of Famers and 3 near Hall of Famers. Do people realize how rare that is? (And, by the way, what great players did the system kick out the last 3 years of Stick/Watson? The anser is: none.) Yes, SOME team in baseball has that happen to them in just about every 5-10 year period. But the same team, time-after-time? That stopped happening in the 1960′s with the creation of the Rule 4 Draft.

It is dammed hard to win one title, even if you spend a lot of money. It is almost impossible to do what they did a decade ago, under the current systemic mechanisms to enforce competitive balance.

The Yanks can outspend their mistakes; that’s their advantage. But that only keeps them in contention, year-after-year. It doesn’t win titles, and by itself, it never will (see 1983 to 1988). The Yanks are going to have to be very smart AND get lucky with their farm system to have another multiyear dynasty.

Steve Lombardi wrote:

@ YankCrank: OK, how’s this: Let’s see him build JUST ONE team – that’s not seeded with players from a previous GM – that goes on to win a World Series with a payroll of $150 million or less. If he did that, I would be impressed.

Haha, Steve you are a smart man…you have to know that this is also unrealistic at this point in time. Jeter, Pettitte, River and Posada are still on this team. Once again, you give Cash a 0% chance of succeeding under your standards.

As for the $150 million figure, i’m curious as to why a die-hard Yankee fan would only feel right if his team won on a budget? I tend to ask myself, when thinking of the Yankees and their use of money, which would upset me more…if the Yankees had all the money in the world and used it to better their chances of winning, or if they had all the money in the world and chose to pocket it and blend in with the rest of baseball?

I think we should ask some A’s, Rays or Marlins fans if they’d rather have their owners pocket money or spend it and see what they say.