Schilling on Teixera

December 24th, 2008 omo Posted in Social | No Comments »

Of all the immediate fallout and press spinnage from the Mark Teixera deal from the past ~23 hours, Curt Schilling, the venerable starting pitcher of the Boston Red Sox, says it the best. And puts it in terms of number.

You can read it from his blog, 38 Pitches.

More pertinently:

Please stop with the greedy bum statements too, all of you screaming that would be saying nothing if the Sox had ante’d up. I’m surprised but I don’t think nearly as much as most others. Why? Because not once, never, did you hear ANYTHING from Mark in this entire charade. This is how Scott Boras works, and his clients love him for it. Mark never said he wanted Boston, sources ‘close to negotiations’ did. That and a handful of nickels will get you a quarter.

Stop being surprised in these deals when you hear comments from EVERYONE but the players. Until the player speaks I am comfortable telling you more than 90 percent of what you hear is what teams WANT you to hear through their media ’sources’. Half of these folks get told things from teams because teams WANT that message in particular, out there.

and, obviously, because after all, he is on the paid-end of the equation:

I think the Steinbrenners, coming off a miserable last season in Yankee Stadium, are dead set on opening the new stadium with a World Series and they don’t care how much it costs. Good for them. You can bitch all you want about the Yankees and greed but they spend money in a sincere effort to win it all, every year. What fan wouldn’t want their teams to do that.

Sounds fair to me.

My own thoughts are along that line. There’s nobody to blame, really. Boras is doing his job by getting the highest buck for his clients. Let’s say even if Baltimore’s $140M over 7 years deal went through, it would only produce a 2.5-million-a-year gap to what the 8 year, $180M deal Tex signed. Would anyone cry bloody murder if the O’s got Tex? I don’t think so. And in some ways, Red Sox was silly for not paying that extra, what, $1 a year to seal the deal over Yankee’s offer.

I suppose this is a sign…that paying extra to get YES on DirectTV meant something.

The meta narrative about baseball and spend-to-win strategies, and the lopsidedness of a very successful franchise over the poor ones is for another day. It has wholly different implications, ones I’m not sure that would make the Yankees any more disadvantaged than before. Evening the playing field with a salary cap would just piss off talents like the likes of Sabathia and Teixera, and isn’t it those people fans pay the money to see?

What I would like to see is how the rest of this off season’s trades and bidding fall out. Not so much who wins or who loses, but the new teams that are formed by moving talents from one team to another.

But either way the Rays will still be a contender this year, and they can only get better from snagging a good free agent that they didn’t have before.

Tags: baseball