Pennywisdom, pound-foolishnes, and Pettite

I don't doubt that the Yankees did everything they could to bring Andy Pettite back to the Bronx. (And as a lifelong Yankee fam I appreciate that effort.) But let's face it: The Yankees didn't win Pettite so much as the Astros lost him. For once, Richard Justice understood the issue perfectly:

Pettitte is a bargain at $15 million. Well, not really. He's a bargain in the context of the current free-agent insanity in which mediocre pitchers (Ted Lilly, Gil Meche) are scoring $10 million or more a year.

Jason Schmidt, a bona fide No. 1 starter, got a reported $47 million over three years from the Dodgers. Pettitte is like Schmidt in that he's a proven commodity.

Here's what you get with Andy Pettitte: 200-plus innings and 15-plus victories. Throw in some additional offense (hello, Carlos Lee), and you've got yourself an 18-game winner.

He's a comfortable fit with either team. Both teams know what they're getting on the mound and in the clubhouse. He's at his best when the games mean the most and is a terrific influence on younger pitchers. He's someone seemingly unchanged by wealth and fame.

Teammates, managers, coaches and fans all like him. What you see is what you get with Pettitte.

The Astros need him. If McLane will spend $100 million on Lee and $12.5 million on Woody Williams, he'd be foolish to lose Pettitte over $3 million and a second guaranteed year.

What makes for a bad contract signing these days is not so much annual salary as it is contract length. Injury risk, natural decline from aging, just the possibility that the player wasn't as good as you think - that's what you have to worry about. Being wrong for one or two years is a lot less burdonsome, and restricts your ability to make future deals a lot less than being wrong in the fourth, fifth, or sixth year. Think the end of Jeff Bagwell's contract, or if you want to be pessimistic, Carlos Lee's. There's just no universe in which signing Lee for six years and 100 million makes sense but offering Pettite two million more plus a player option for a second year doesn't. This wasn't just a bad baseball decision, it was a bad business decision.

Justice's rants about megabucks for mediocrity aside, what we have now is what the market will bear.

"It's no different than the housing market in Toronto or any large city in North America," said Paul Godfrey, the president of the Blue Jays, in the Toronto Sun. "Everyone says it can't continue to rise. But it can. And it does. Same in baseball, we have revenues going up and a new collective bargaining agreement and everybody's feeling good about the game, and so the spiral starts again and people say salaries are out of control. I don't know what's out of control any more."

And therein lies the perfectly simple answer… What is "out of control" any more? The deals being done cannot be viewed in a vacuum. They are indicative of the time and the place and the financial well-being of MLB right now. Suddenly, Godfrey can point to the deals the Blue Jays made last season for A.J. Burnett and B.J. Ryan and say, "Everyone said, 'How can give you five-year contracts and with such large numbers like that?' One year later, if you put Ryan and Burnett on the market, they would get a whole lot more than they got last winter. All of a sudden you look at our deal and you might think we got a bargain."

Baseball players are getting more money because there's more money available for them. If they didn't get it, the owners would. It's a simple as that.

Tom is less critical of the Astros' decision on Pettite. I think he's right to say that Pettite isn't as good as Justice says, but even at Pettite's less-than-stellar 2006 level, I think Drayton McLane picked the wrong time and the wrong player with which to rediscover frugality. The risk wasn't that high, and in context the money wasn't that much. It's an odd choice to make.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 10, 2006 to Baseball | TrackBack