Brokedown palace
With all due respect to Rich Harden and Ben Sheets, no thanks.
Look, I love the bargain-basement approach the Highest Average Ticket Price in the League Red Sox take in the free agent market as much as anyone, but haven’t we already tried filling out the rotation with enough elite name/bad arm guys? In reality, what is Rich Harden going to do that Boston can’t potentially get out of Michael Bowden, who would likely be in the rotation come June anyway once Harden inevitably goes down?
High-risk, high-reward: Your 2010 Boston Red Sox.
To be fair, the Brad Penny experiment of a year ago worked for two months and waiting for John Smoltz to join the team was worth about five mid-July innings of enjoyment. Whatever. The important thing is that each one cost pennies on the dollar. That’s of utmost importance for a team with one of the highest payrolls in the game.
If they worked out, they would have been shrewd moves by Theo Epstein. They didn’t, and the Red Sox gained a reputation (Wade Miller, Bartolo Colon, etc…) of trying to go on the cheap. Hey, when you’re sinking empty dollars into Julio Lugo, Edgar Renteria, and whomever the next Epstein shortstop target is going to be, you need to start cutting back wherever you can.
The Yankees backed up the Brinks truck last offseason for CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett, and the result was a title. The Red Sox, meanwhile, found it necessary to restructure Tim Wakefield’s rollover $4 million deal. That saved the team $1.5 million under the competitive balance tax. That’s interesting to note because the tax threshold for 2010 will be $170 million, and the Sox spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $122 million last season. Are they really going to add $50 million worth of payroll? Or is John Henry simply trying to prove a point?
Really, I don’t have a problem with trying to find lightning in a bottle. While I’m soft on Harden, a healthy Sheets would add a measure of dominance to a rotation already bordering on the best in the league. Then again, a healthy Sheets comes around about as often as the Olympic downhill.
But here’s the real issue: The Red Sox will lay $51 million on the table to talk to Daisuke Matsuzaka, but won’t triple that kind of money for a free agent ace, lest they lose the draft picks, or get stuck with a bum contract should said pitcher blow out his arm.
While there’s a lot of common sense to that approach, and continuing to develop guys like Jon Lester in lieu of tossing cash at free agents, tell me the difference between the wasted money at the back end of a pitcher’s contract and the $13.5 million the team is paying the Cardinals to employ Lugo. It also assumes the Sox will pass on potential free agent starters in the future who will simply sign 200 miles to the southwest. If Josh Beckett walks (stocking up on those Type A’s), who’s going to replace him in 2011? We’ll have to wait and see which big name gets injured this year and provides the most value a year from now. He’ll be a shoo-in.
If they lose out on both Jason Bay and Matt Holliday this offseason, are we going to hear a lot about how rich the farm system is, and that Ryan Kalish is ready to assume his position in left field come April? Hey, those draft picks they got in not signing Holliday or Bay will be worth something four years down the road. Perhaps the Yankees will have only won twice more by then.
If the Red Sox want to fill out their rotation with the likes of Harden and Sheets, fine. But to do so and postpone the growth of a farm system that they supposedly have so much faith in can be maddening. How many wins did the team sacrifice by stubbornly leaving Clay Buchholz in the minors least season? We learned last year the cliché of “you can never have too much pitching” rings true. That should be “good” pitching though.
Value – and the drawbacks of having saved by going another avenue – can sometimes cost you more in the long run.
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