or Jason Bay?

lol I agree with you (still can’t believe it). Giambi was a joke at first base. Yea, he hit homers and drew walks when he was healthy, but he can do nothing defensively. Have you seen him throw the ball?

I agree that this Yankees team may look different next year, while it seems the Red Sox are looking the same (assuming they resign Jason Bay). I’m expecting either Damon or Matsui to be resigned, and them to sign an outfielder or get Austin Jackson up from the minor leagues to give them a chance.

Also I really hope that Joba goes to the bullpen forever. He can’t start. At all. Too many pitches. It’s painful watching him start.

1) Sox offered Tex basically the same contract as we did, he chose to come to NY for whatever reason. Don’t act like you were “saving” money for a rainy day. He’s likely the reason Yankees made it to the playoffs this year while the Sox did not, (although he certainly has not been helping since they got there). This “saving money for later” approach likely puts the Sox in the unenviable position of looking to acquire an A-Gonz or similar bat for the price of prospects not greenbacks. I’d rather spend loot than youngsters any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

B) I’m not going to waste the bandwidth talking about how stupid the notion that “the Sox value the farm and the Yankees don’t” is. I’m pretty sure that meme died years ago, no?

4)You said: the Yanks would rather give away their first rounder every year for the best new toy.

What you should have said: The Yankees have had a first round pick 19 of the past 20 years source.
 

Don’t forget the luxury tax. They spent more like $120M more than us this year. Almost double.

Boston has some big financial hitters like the Harvard Fund and Insurance Companies, but it is difficult when the MFY have the biggest badasses in the financial world working for you, finding new ways to rake in capital, being peace broker between the Yankees and A-Rod, (both clients) when A-Rod opted out of his contract in 2007. Taking up as minority partner for YES…

The MFY are in one of the largest media markets in the world. If the Steinbrenners wanted to sell for example, they would probably get the Forbes value of the team of $1.5 billion, compare to the Dodgers, who will probably be sold in the near future, and won’t sell for the Forbes valuation because the McCourts don’t own the broadcasting rights…

Or DID they? O_o

The MFY have spent $1.34 billion since 2003. Until this year, they have little to show for all that money. The MFY have averaged $191 million per year in payroll. The Red Sox have averaged about $67 million less per year, and have won two championships. I think many people are overreacting to the success of the MFY this year.

New York are not a model franchise. They’ve signed players to some really bad contracts:

Jason Giambi – 7 years/$120 million
Alex Rodriguez – 10 years/$275 million ($143 million covers A-Rod at age 38-42)
Carl Pavano – 4 years/$40 million (Pavano made 26 starts in 4 years)
Kyle Farnsworth – 3 years/$17 million
Johnny Damon – 4 years/$52 million (Judas was signed to play CF. He has been a LF/DH for 3 years. $13 million a year is a lot to pay for poor defense and the .821 OPS Damon has averaged a year in NY—mostly in LF)
AJ Burnett - 5 years/$82.5 million (Burnett is not worth $16.5 million per year, especially at age 32-36)
The jury is still out of the CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira contracts. Will Sabathia be worth the $23 million a year he’ll make between age 30-35 (assuming he doesn’t opt out of the contract). Teixeira will be making $22.5 million a year until he’s 36-years old.

I’m OK with the way the Sox operate.

The final judgment has been passed.

As someone mentioned above, the Sox have acquired no FA’s by outbidding the Yankees. The only true high-priced FA’s on the Sox are JD Drew (little interest from the MFY) and Dice-K (not a true FA). The Yankees have outbid us on Teixeira, Damon and A-Rod (in trade talks, though money was the biggest issue). They also have brought in high priced FA’s in CC, Burnett, Pettite (though he probably wasn’t going to play anywhere else) and Matsui.

I consider the Hanley trade a win-win. It basically won us a WS. We lost out on six years of the best SS in the game at below-market price, but we got 4 years of Josh Beckett at below-market price plus Mike Lowell. Trades are going to be the way that this team acquires high-end talent. We just don’t have the resources to beat the Yankees at their own game. We draft and develop players and then either trade them away for established talent, or keep them around. As long as we keep around more good ones than we give up, we’ll be doing okay.

You can highlight whole paragraphs – just make sure whatever you want to be in a box is within the <.blockquote><./blockquote> tags (without the period I added to make them stay visible).

And then promptly hang up; they don’t HAVE to accept what the other team offers. Also, a team can essentially buy a player and his contract from another team, if they will accept just money. And that’s not the same as FA, because if the deal isn’t made, the player stays on his original team, whereas in FA he just returns to a pool of unemployed players seeking a contract.

The question is: can one team simply buy a player from another team. The answer is: yes. Oftentimes a team will take an “albatross” contract from the other team in addition to the player they actually want. This was the case when the Sox got Lowell and Beckett. Lowell was thought to be washed up, so we took his contract off their hands in exchange for getting Josh Beckett (and of course we gave them Hanley, too). This could happen on a larger scale or with a worse player. For example, the Blue Jays would probably give Roy Halladay away for nothing if the team agreed to take Vernon Wells too.

or extorting hundreds of millions from New York City to build a wind tunnel for your team’s lefthanded batters.