There was never any chance that the Indians would pay Sabathia upwards of $20 million over the next seven years, which is the kind of money and the length of time it was going to take to keep him in a Cleveland uniform. The risk in the out years of injury on such a contract are far too great for a team like the Indians to sustain. Like it or not, the present regime is not going to allow itself the kind of payroll flexibility to withstand an extra $20 or $30 million of unproductive money should Sabathia have proved to be ineffective or injured in years five, six, or seven. Capitalism being what it is, someone else will. It’s the system that Major League Baseball prefers.
If you focus just on the American League Central, which is as good a barometer of the rest of Major League Baseball as anything else, it is clearly a division of haves and have nots from a payroll perspective. More than anything else, it illustrates why the Indians can’t invest in a player like Sabathia for the long term while Chicago and Detroit can and will.
Both Chicago and Detroit are working with payrolls that are in excess of $120 million. At that level, a $20 million a year salary for one player still allows either team to spend more than 80 percent of the rest of its payroll on the other 24 players. And that’s 80% of a rather large pie to begin with. For the Indians, or Kansas City or Minnesota for that matter, a team that works with budgets well below $100 million, that kind of salary eats up 25% or more of the team’s payroll. That gives the team far less to work with, both as a percentage of payroll and in real dollars, when filling out a roster worthy of investing that much money in a superstar in the first place. Indeed, it’s the reason that the Texas Rangers ultimately decided that their signing of Alex Rodriguez was among the great blunders ever in baseball.
Article comments
1 - alina
Grady won't be leaving anytime soon, The Cleveland Indians locked up their center field position into the next decade, agreeing Wednesday to a $23.45 million, six-year contract with Grady Sizemore. Martinez, the indians have him till 2010..so I look for other trades like garko possibly even though that would hurt but his contract was only a year...I guess we'll see.