Wednesday, December 3, 2003

Yankee-Induced Nausea

This article from The Onion has already made the rounds, but as Peter Gammons points out, "George Steinbrenner wants to prove that he can bring that famous piece in The Onion... to life and take it to Broadway."

It's a little sickening to look at the Yankees' 2003 salaries (scroll to bottom of page) and realize that they're adding even more salary for the coming season. And it's amazing that my A's can even begin to compete with the Yanks on only one-third of their budget.

Interesting Note #1: The 2003 Yankees paid just over $10M in '03 for Sterling Hitchcock and Jeff Weaver. The two combined for 209 innings and a 5.86 ERA. That's just terrible.

Interesting Note #2: With $10M, the 2003 A's could afford Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder (a combined 658 innings and a 3.03 ERA) and still have enough money left over to afford Eric Chavez, a gold glove third baseman with 29 HR and 101 RBI!

The message here is that the A's have a razor thin margin of error when making personnel decisions, while the Yankees have a Cecil Fielder-sized margin of error, as evidenced by the Weaver/Hitchcock contracts.

More on this later...

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