This is what happens, exactly what happens, when the Yankees finish out of the playoffs even in a two-wild card world, and attendance is down, and television ratings are down, and their biggest attraction becomes a rich bust-out case like Alex Rodriguez, the Kardashian they had playing third base for them in August and September.
This is what happens when the Red Sox win their third World Series in a decade, against one for the Yankees in that time, a time when they spend more than $200 million a year on baseball players. So now the Yankees go out and agree to a deal with Jacoby Ellsbury for the kind of insane longterm contract that got them into the kind of fix they are in in the first place.
They do the only thing they can do: Try to buy their way out of this. If you were running the team, you would do it exactly that way. You have no real assets in the farm system. You have money. So you spend it.
So they essentially give six guaranteed years to a new catcher and seven years to Ellsbury, who steals bases and gets on base even if you don’t want to look what has happened to his home run totals lately. They say they won’t give an 8-year contract or a 10-year contract to Robinson Cano. But they give Jacoby Ellsbury more than $20 million a year for seven years. And will be shocked if they can’t keep him on the field.
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The Red Sox win the World Series by putting Shane Victorino with Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia at the top of their lineup, and Ellsbury with Victorino in their outfield, making it a small miracle when somebody would hit one over their heads. Now they put Ellsbury next to Brett Gardner in the outfield at Yankee Stadium. So they sign Ellsbury to the kind of contract that the Red Sox had to unload with Carl Crawford. The reason for this is the best reason in the world:
They can’t let next season be like this season. We all praised how hard they fought and how well Joe Girardi managed. The problem was that not nearly enough people cared.
Always when the Yankees make this kind of play in the past, it was called sheer genius in a company town. Oh sure. In the past, the Yankees would spend money in this insane way — $153 million for Jacoby Ellsbury?
Really? — and immediately be declared champions before they even showed up in Tampa for spring training. It won’t happen this time, even if Ellsbury does make them better than signing another AARP guy for their outfield.
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But again: They had to do something, whether they end up under the $189 million threshold everybody in town was obsessing about, or not. So they do what they do. They don’t just pay, they overpay. They did it with CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira and won a World Series. That offseason cost them over $400 million. They are way past $200 million now and they haven’t reached a deal yet with Cano.
No farm system, no choice. You spend money. Maybe they will get around to spending it on pitching eventually.
For now, you know who’s happy when the Yankees get desperate like this? Agents. B-list stars like Ellsbury paid like A-listers. One of the reasons that the Yankees spent $230 million on a baseball team that didn’t make the playoffs this year was because aging stars at the back ends of their contracts weren’t close to being the players they were when they got the contracts. Jeter was hurt, A-Rod played two months, Sabathia was just another pitcher.
The Yankees get grinders like Ellsbury and a tough catcher like Brian McCann who can hit home runs and might hit a bunch at Yankee Stadium, and think they can out-grind the Red Sox next summer. And overlook the fact that the Red Sox didn’t just grind and beard their way to another World Series, they pitched their way there, with Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz when he was healthy and Jake Peavy and John Lackey once again becoming the guy who started and won a Game 7 of the World Series for the Angels when he was a kid.
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So the Yankees give too many years to a catcher and too many years and too much money to Ellsbury, a fast exciting player who gets hurt. In the season that earned him this contract, he played 134 games. The season before he played 74. He can also play 158 games in a season. We will see where we are with this in a year or two. Or four.
This is what the Yankees do. This is what they do, and who they are, and you can’t fault them for being who they are. The big play for the Red Sox last winter, financially, was Victorino, and people thought Boston was overpaying him at $39 million for three years. The Yankees top that by more than $100 million with Ellsbury.
They give him the kind of contract that the Red Sox had to get out from under to win the World Series again.
It doesn’t mean that Ellsbury won’t be as much fun to watch as Johnny Damon was when the Yankees got him out of Boston. If Ellsbury helps the Yankees back into the playoffs, the Yankees won’t give a rip about if or when he breaks down at the end of this contract. That would involve taking the long view. There is no such thing at Yankee Stadium.
The joke used to be that the Yankee farm system was the All-Star Game. Now it’s a World Series in Boston.