Penny Wise and Pound Foolish
Speaking of Delmon Young, I think we just found out why he’s taking whatever endorsement deals he can find before his stardom reaches anywhere beyond FireGardy.com … the Twins decided to jack him out of a bit of salary.
Under the collective bargaining agreement, the Twins had a right to cut Delmon Young’s salary by 20 percent this year. Including his pro-rated signing bonus, he made $1,440,000 last year, so the least the Twins could pay him was $1,152,000.While I personally think it’s a bunch of crap that non-free-agent players can only take a 20% pay cut, and that we’re responsible for pro-rating the signing bonus Tampa Bay decided to give him, and that he was worth (negative!)$2.4M in 2008 (scroll to the bottom), this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that’ll make a player happy.On Thursday, the Twins signed Young for that amount, exactly.
Given that it was a bit of a struggle for him last year, and he didn’t live up to our expectations, I understand that we wouldn’t exactly want to give him a raise. But given that everyone else in the entire f’ing league gets a raise, I can also see why he might be a little pissed off that we decided to give him the absolute minimum we were allowed to. Maybe splitting the difference would have worked a bit better? Seriously, we’re talking about $150K for a team that’s $20M below its budget.
And by doing what we can to save a couple of bucks, we risk awakening the thoughts in Delmon’s head that he formerly stated about Tampa Bay; his stated plan to “do [his] six and bolt.”
Hopefully this pisses Delmon off enough that he hits a hell of a lot better this year, but not enough that he wants to leave the Twins at his first opportunity. I don’t want our players counting the days until they can leave.
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amen
and then figure out Cuddaver’s worth last year vs. what he made…
-$1.3M vs $5.9M.
So he didn’t hurt the team as much overall … but the gap was bigger and the crappiness-per-game-played was definitely worse.
With Cuddyer getting back to what he should be (from 2005-2007 he was worth $5.4M, $10.8M, $8.4M) and an improvement from Delmon (I think everyone should legitimately expect that), the Twins should be quite a bit better in 2009.
Also more Span and a little less Gomez. And less Everett and Lamb. And replace Livan with a 2-years-remove-from-surgery-Liriano.
Yes, I’m not really shitting myself about the upcoming season.
Oh, and when I say “less Gomez,” I … um … don’t really mean it. For those of us that are a little frustrated by the fact that he’s completely lost at the plate and swings at more pitches outside of the strike zone than anyone except Vladimir Guerrero and Delmon Young AND has no power … well, his defense is good. Really. Fucking. Good. So good, in fact, that it completely balances his offensive ineptitude.
Carlos Gomez was worth +2.2 wins last year. That’s $10.1M worth of baseball. I hope he enjoyed his $400K of actual dollars.
Oh, and also … what happens if he actually gets better at hitting? Are we all prepared for this? Should the Twins have contractually required him to hang out with Span and Mauer all winter?
If I owned the team, that’s what I would have done. Gomez and Delmon are required to spend every waking moment with Denard and Mauer. Bam.