The $12 Million Man
Posted on December 12th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
The Yankees have signed Kevin Youkilis to a one-year, $12 million deal so that he can play third base for them until Alex Rodriguez recovers from his hip injury in, probably, July.
Nice work if you can get it!
This means that the Yankees are paying, what, $35 million to two third basemen whose average age is 36. Something is not right in Bronxland.
Of course much will be written about the trauma of a former Sox hero joining the evil Bombers, and of the Yankees signing the despised Youkilis. (It will be hard to imagine Yankee fans shouting “Youk!”)
But what I think is more relevant, and more deserving of attention, is the news that the Yankees are severing their relationship with the ticket reseller StubHub—even as most of baseball sticks with StubHub—because they think that StubHub is hurting their ticket sales.
As The [New York] Post first reported, the Yankees are miffed fans can buy tickets for a couple of bucks right up until game time because StubHub has refused to put a price floor for transactions on its site.
The Yankees are deluding themselves here. The reason that Yankee ticket sales are flat to down is because Yankee tickets cost more than the market can bear. That’s why, virtually every day during the baseball season, I get email offers from the Yankees for “ticket specials”—which is to say, tickets they can’t sell at face value.
Hardly competing in this year’s free agent market, the Yankees are obviously making moves to cut their budget, which feels a bit weird for Yankee fans but is ultimately a healthy thing. With that in mind…you couldn’t have signed a substitute third baseman for less than $12 million?
3 Responses
12/12/2023 6:53 pm
I have very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I hate seeing Youk in a Yankees uniform and I’m going to hate watching him hit against the Red Sox. On the other hand, this looks like a pretty bad signing from the Yankees perspective. Youk is declining rapidly and this seems like a big overpay, as you note. So I like that it will make the Yankees worse and cost them money. Like I said, I’m very conflicted.
12/12/2023 7:19 pm
Sigh. I can’t argue with any of that, mad@er. But maybe Youk will have one more good year left in him.
12/12/2023 7:32 pm
The pickings were pretty slim … Youk, Jack Hannahan, Scott Rolen, Placido Polanco, Brandon Inge, Miguel Cairo (carbon dating has his age at 137), Casey McGhee (who Yanks traded for and demoted and is now a free agent) or Mark Reynolds. Not much of a choice. Whatever you do.
And, I think AFraud is owed $28 million this year so the 3B outlay is $40 million. But what’s 5 million to the Yanks?
That is quite worrisome. And to think AFraud gets through 2017 the following:
2014 - 25 million
2015 - 21 million
2016 - 20 million
2017 - 20 million
Steve Austin became a bionic man for 6 million, the Yanks may need bionic replacement parts for AFraud as soon as 2013. It’s gonna get ugly.