Yankees And Cashman: Why Do Sports Teams Strain To Keep Mediocre Leaders?

Despite having the highest payroll in baseball by a ridiculous margin, the Yankees have not won the World Series in eight seasons.  They have not won the pennant since 2003.  Their prime competitors have overtaken their position as the best team in the American League.

If the Yankees' stock were publicly traded, it would have taken a drastic nosedive since 2000's ho-hum World Series win over the New York Mets.  On Wall Street, that's what continued underperformance wins.  In baseball, apparently, it secures a three-year contract extension.

The New York Yankees payroll this year is 209 million.  The combined sum of the Brewers and Angels payrolls?  A little over 200 million.  For a little over 150 million, one could pay the rosters of the Phillies, Rays, and Twins—three teams who decisively did better than the Yankees this year.

Blame it all you want on Joe Girardi or whatever other reasons you wish, in the end the Yankees slow decline into third place comes down to a fundamental fault in Cashman's managerial philosophy.

Instead of looking long-term and developing a core roster of players in their relative primes—like the way the 1996-2000 Yankees were built around Jeter, Williams, Posada, Pettite, Rivera, Nelson, etc., along with Roger Clemens and Paul O'Neil, who seemed to have never-ending primes—Cashman has opted for the cheapest thing a general manager can do: signing players on the downturn of their careers for over market value.

Seven of the eight everday players on the '00 Yankees were between 26 and 33.  In 2008, only three regulars were under 32 (Robinson Cano, Melky Cabrera, and Xavier Nady). 

Instead, the Yankees have seen a nice cavalcade of fading talent: Jason Giambi is somehow still kicking it at 37; Johnny Damon was signed at 32 and though he had a strong '08 season is ripe to go the way of Jim Edmonds; Bobby Abreu has seen a 12 percent drop in his on-base percentage in the last two seasons; and let's not forget this season's praised deal for Ivan Rodriguez, who hit .219.

Signing twilight guys like Wade Boggs works when Pettite and Clemens anchor the rotation.  It doesn't when the top starter is 39 and Sidney Ponson and Carl Pavano both wind up taking the hill.

What are Cashman's highlights as GM?  Trading for the twenty million dollar MVP?  Continually signing an endless stream of overrated players to hefty, ten-million-a-year contracts?  Where is the skill in this?  Where is the business sense?

With the resources at his disposal, Cashman's performance is inadequate.  If I lost to four competitors who had half the resources in the real world, I would be fired.  It's that simple. Cashman, miraculously, gets an extension.

The truth is that almost any idiot with any baseball acumen could take 210 Million dollars and coast into third in the AL East.  With twice the budget of any other team, a truly respectable goal is 110 wins and the pennant, year in and year out.  With baseball's strong correlation between money and success, fiscal dominance should lead to either on-the-field dominance or a canning.

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