Damn Yankees

People often make jokes along the lines of, "Hey, how cool would it be if baseball had relegation like European soccer? Then the Royals could get sent down to AAA and have to try and battle their way back to the majors!" And so forth. Well, at Monday's trade deadline we saw perhaps the most European soccer-like move we're ever going to see in Major League Baseball: the arrangement for a player to change teams for a transfer fee.

The Phillies, looking to dump Bobby Abreu and his gigantic contract, managed to trade him to the Yankees (along with Cory Lidle, only one of the two or three most coveted arms to change hands at the deadline) for - get ready! - the loaded package of Matt Smith, C.J. Henry, and two low-minors prospects.

Um, what?

Put it this way: if this trade happened in your fantasy league, it would be vetoed by your commissioner within approximately eight seconds. Smith has pitched twelve innings this year; Henry is regarded as a project at best (and he had basically no value to the Yankees considering who they have manning his spot - shortstop - in the field); and the two other players may never even see Triple-A, let alone the majors.

On paper this looks like highway robbery. And, from a personnel standpoint, it was (especially since, as reported by Jayson Stark, multiple other teams offered better prospect deals for Lidle alone; the Yankees somehow convinced the Phillies that they wouldn't make the deal unless Lidle were thrown in). But the catch is what the Yankees sent to the Phillies that wasn't a player: about $21 million in salary relief.

Okay, so the Yankees didn't literally pull out the checkbook and dash off a $21 million check to Philadelphia just for the privilege of paying Abreu some more. But as far as why the deal happened, it was pretty much the same reason. The Phillies wanted Abreu off the books, and when they couldn't get even approximate talent back, they traded him for one cent on the dollar, just to save some cash. And naturally, the only team in the world that could have just suddenly assumed a $15.5 million payroll hit for 2007 - the Yankees - was the team that landed him.

How can you look at a situation like this and tell me there doesn't need to be a hard salary cap in baseball? How long is this crap going to be allowed to happen? It's easy to point at the fact that the Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2000 - and believe me, no one relishes that more than I do - but it's also easy to overlook the fact that they still haven't missed the playoffs in the three-division format. Whether the Abreu deal wins the Yankees the Series this year, or even the pennant, remains to be seen, but it will almost certainly help them get into the playoffs. Most teams have cycles because that's just what's dictated by the way things are supposed to work; the Yankees' utter lack of concern for how much money they're spending (because there are other teams with that kind of money if they really wanted to spend that much, but other teams have a little more fiscal responsibility) allows them to buy their way out of the cycles' low points. Not all the way out, as evidenced by the inability of the $200 million team to win a World Series in this millennium so far, but out more than any other team. Look at the Twins, a young team on the rise thanks to an upswing in talented young players; no team except the Tigers has been hotter over the past two months, and yet the Twins may still miss the playoffs. The team making it at their expense will almost certainly be the Red Sox, White Sox, or the Yankees, conveniently enough the teams with three of the four highest payrolls in baseball. So the Twins should get screwed during what has otherwise been a great year for them because they can't afford to throw out nine figures to bring in one or two more difference-making players? Seems kind of unfair, don't you think? And just wait until five years from now when Morneau, Santana, Hunter, and Liriano have all jumped ship for bigger contracts.

I really want the Yankees to miss the playoffs, just to end the thought that you can buy a winner. But too many other teams are doing it now to end that. The genie is out of the bottle. And you know who opened the bottle in the first place? The Yankees, way back on December 31, 1974, when they signed Catfish Hunter as a free agent to a contract that was triple the salary of anyone else in baseball at the time. Guess who bought the Yankees less than two years earlier? Damn, why couldn't Fay Vincent's lifetime ban of Steinbrenner in 1990 have been held up?

As a wise man once said... fuck the fucking Yankees.