New York Yankees Suck, They Always Have... They Always Will

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July 7, 2002
Scott Gleason
Yanks-Suck.Com

The Yankees have won the American League pennant for the last four years running, and just this past week they reminded us that this dominance isn’t likely to stop anytime soon (Of course, they said that about the Roman Empire, right?) by picking up Raul Mondesi and Jeff Weaver in trades.

For Mondesi, the trade was a simple dump of a ludicrous salary from a team that could no longer afford to shoulder it, to a team that would barely notice that it was now carrying one more. "A lot of teams are complaining, and why are they complaining?" Steinbrenner said in a story published in Newsday on Saturday. "The deal we made for the right fielder, they could have made that deal. Same with this young man (Weaver). What he's going to make this year, next year, it's not a big money grab. This is just good trading."

Okay, let’s break it down. How many teams could realistically have traded to pick up $12.5 million of the $18.5 Mondesi is owed over the next season and a half. The Dodgers, Red Sox, Rangers and Mets jump to mind, but none of them have the television revenue that Steinbrenner does. In ’01, the Yankees took in $145 million in TV revenue, with the Mets ($112) and the Dodgers ($92) a distant second and third. According to CNN, the Yankees payroll to begin the season was over $17.5 million higher than the next big spender on the block, the Red Sox. That was before they decided to take on mssrs. Mondesi and Weaver (although they do lose the HUGE salary that Ted Lilly was making this season: $237,150).

Of course, comparing the Yankees to the other top tier teams isn’t the problem, it’s when you get to the bottom-rung players that you see the real problems. How can the Pirates or Expos realistically compete against someone with the ability to spend four times as much as them while still making money. And as we see all of the shady accounting that breaks up major corporations like Enron, Global Crossing and WorldComm, it’s hard not to give a shout to the fact of how teams that own their television networks decide to recognize revenue from their TV deals. From Business Week, “Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, for instance, is likely to pull in over $200 million from his YES network but reportedly will claim only $54 million as local-TV revenue,” and they also mention that “The effective tax (what teams pay to revenue sharing) is actually much lower than that because teams get to hide substantial revenue from stadium and local-TV deals and also to liberally deduct expenses related to stadium operations.”

One could point to the Weaver trade and say that the Yankees traded from a strong farm system, one that has given them current starters Alfonso Soriano, Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Orlando Hernandez, Nick Johnson and Jorge Posada. My question would be, how many of them did they get through the draft? We all know that scouting in other countries costs money, with teams paying huge figures to set up camps in all parts of the world, not too mention the bidding wars that happen for some of the players when they are ready to sign. Until baseball wises up, uses collective money to develop players in other countries and institutes a global draft, this will be just one more area to widen the disparity between the haves and the have-nots.

Also, each time the Yankees make a deadline deal, which seems to happen every season, they lose no compensatory picks, as they would have if they signed these players as free agents. Thus, being a team that has the money in the payroll to take on an extra salary or two at the deadline has the dual effect of costing you nothing now (if it was budgeted into the payroll, as it is on the top three-to-five teams) and nothing later. In fact, since teams looking to unload salary don’t ask for REAL prospects, nor do they get compensatory picks, and often, as was the case of the Mondesi trade, are forced to pay some of the salary later, it makes sense for the Yankees to only go after the very best in free agent talent. Every season there is a mid-level talent that got signed to a too-long-a-term deal that will be available under this discount plan.

There’s no doubt that the Yankees run their business wisely, as we have all seen the Orioles and Dodgers spend boat loads of money only to finish nowhere near the playoffs, but once the financial numbers get skewed to the point they’re reaching, and they widen by the year, there’s no reason to talk about “level playing fields” but just trying to keep the disparity from being so steep. There will never be a salary cap, and George Steinbrenner will always benefit from owning the New York team, as opposed to baseball benefiting and the owner being happy that the league allows him to own a franchise. Talking about this to Yankees fans will always open you up to hearing that you are just jealous. What’s the answer, you say?

Say it along with me, “Yankees Suck!”

Scott Gleason, a former writer for RotoWire.com, shows his hatred of the New York Yankees through song with the band BenderX. Download their aptly titled song Yankees Suck.