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If it seems like all I do is rage against the Boston sportswriters these days, that’s probably because all I do is rage against the Boston sportswriters (Sean McAdam being the notable exception) these days. Things were not always thus; don’t even get me started talking about those halcyon days when Gammons was hurtling towards the Hall of Fame, cranking out his must read Sunday Notes columns that got me out of bed – hangovers notwithstanding – to walk six long blocks down to Columbus Circle to pick up the Globe.

Scott Berkun’s piece might explain to you why presumably smart people like Tony Massarotti defend bad ideas, but I can’t. I can offer no rational explanation for why the professionals make some of the arguments they do, when the evidence is stacked against them.

But then I’m not a professional, merely one of those Mom’s basement bloggers Tony doesn’t have time to read.

Anyway, because I think Mazz is entirely wrong – again – with his latest piece discussing the Teixeira deal, I felt duty bound to give him the FJM treatment, as those worthies have sadly hung up their swords.

Teixeira fallout


The Mark Teixeira obviously struck a nerve in all of us, but let’s make something clear here: The Red Sox had a chance. Any suggestion that the Sox could not (and can not) compete for free agents with New York is utter nonsense because the Sox have signed free agents in the past.

No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting that we can’t compete. The Red Sox are a club with significant financial resources that can aggressively pursue the type of free agents that other clubs are simply unable to. What I, and others, have argued, rather, is that we cannot go punch for punch with the Yankees when it comes to contract offers. Because while we have substantial financial resources, we’re not even in the same ballpark as the Empire.

For a moment, let’s look at the cases of Daisuke Matsuzaka and J.D. Drew, the former of whom, admittedly, was not a true free agent.

And the latter of whom was not a target of the Yankees, and is thus more or less irrelevant to this discussion.

Still, when the Sox bid for Matsuzaka’s rights, they blew away the field with a bid of $51.11 million that was 30-40 percent higher than any other offer. Why is this relevant? Because the Sox did the same for Drew, flattening him with a $70 million offer that left him with little choice but to sign.

I say we discard the Drew example here, for the simple fact that as just discussed, the Yankees were not involved in contract discussions with the player. Which leaves us with Matsuzaka, and the difference between our bid for the posted player and theirs.

My read on that delta is that the Red Sox “blew away the field” (read: overbid) because they a.) valued the player more highly than did the Yankees (consider that the Mets also outbid the Yankees for Matsuzaka) and b.) were willing to pay a premium for the posting fee to gain the rights to negotiate with the player absent competition. Competition like the Yankees.

In other words, the Red Sox felt compelled to go all in in the posting phase, because they felt that they could ammortize the cost of the fee over a multiple year, below market contract (which is more or less what’s happened).

Not to mention the ancillary marketing benefits.

To put all of this more simply, Mazz’s two examples – 1.) a player who was not subject to an open market bidding process and 2.) a player in whom the Yankees had essentially no interest – do little to convince me that the Red Sox are on equal footing with the Yankees when it comes to dollars.

With Teixeira, the Sox were not nearly as aggressive.

Personally, I would hope that they wouldn’t be 30-40% more aggressive when the total contract value is greater than 3X what the posting fee was. 40% of $30M being different than 40% of $170M and all that.

The bottom line is that other teams (excluding the Yankees) were in the same neighborhood, which allowed Teixeira to drag out the process. Had the Sox come out of the gate with, say, an eight-year offer for $184 million, maybe they could have gotten the deal done.

You know – because Boras has a history of taking the first offer that comes his way, and little inclination to talk to the Yankees in an effort to obtain top dollar for his paying clients.

Maybe it would have taken $192 million. But if the Sox came out strong — very strong — and gave Teixeira a short window to accept, their chances might have been better.

$192M, $170M – what’s the difference? Who doesn’t want to pay a first baseman whose OPS last year was .004 better than Youk’s $24M per? For 8 years.

If Teixeira then had balked, the Sox would have had their answer: Teixeira never wanted to come here.

If Tex had balked, I think it would have said more about him assuming he could get more money elsewhere than him not wanting “to come here,” but maybe that’s just me.

And if he didn’t, we’d be paying him $24M per year, or 1/6th of our payroll last year (vs 1/9th of the Yankees’). I find it interesting that Mazz accounts for only two possibilities: Tex accepts the offer, or he doesn’t. No mention of said offer being shopped to, say, the Yankees to match.

Instead, the Sox left the door open for the Yankees to swoop in, which created an array of issues. Most notably, by the time Teixeira made his decision, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett both had signed with New York, making the Yankees a more attractive destination; earlier on, that was not the case. By allowing the process to drag, the Sox enhanced New York’s position.

Obviously a deadline would have worked. It clearly did for the Angels. Right?

When you want a free agent, you knock him over. You give more than anyone else to eliminate all doubt. If he doesn’t accept, he doesn’t want to play for you.

That, or you determine ahead of time what you believe a player’s value is, and you bid until you reach that threshold, and then move on to Plan B when said threshold is exceeded so that you don’t wind up paying more for a player than the budget can sustain.

Indeed, there is always the possibility agent Scott Boras used the Sox here.

Of course he did. That’s his job. As Gammons so eloquently put it:

Boras doesn’t want to be the good guy, and doesn’t care who gets burned as long as his clients get the best deal; didn’t Edward Bennett Williams do the best he could for Joe McCarthy and Sirhan Sirhan?

To give you an idea of what Team Boras can be like to deal with, a source on Boras’ side of the negotiations recently suggested that the Red Sox had a chance to close the deal with an offer of $176 million, a mere $6 million more (over eight years, meaning $750,000 per season) over the Sox’ final offer of $170 million.

If Boras took that offer without giving the Yankees the opportunity to outbid – which they did – when his client wanted top dollar, he would have (and should have) been fired.

What Boras’ side failed to disclose was that the same offer included vesting options that would have taken the deal to $220 million over 10 years, something that scared off Sox owner John Henry, in particular. (Pretty sneaky, eh?)

Wait. Doesn’t that contradict Mazz’ whole argument thus far?

As for the Sox, it will be interesting to hear how this story evolves over time. Certainly, the Red Sox had the money to make this work. (Unless, of course, Henry or ownership has financial difficulties of which we are not aware.) There is certainly reason to wonder whether general manager Theo Epstein had difficulty convincing ownership to increase the offer to Teixeira, which went from $168 million to $170 million at the very end.

Is it possible that the Red Sox have some financial difficulties? Sure. But I think it’s far more likely that they didn’t want to pay Mark Teixeira what the Yankees would and could. As Mazz himself put it, the “[Yankees] spend more than the Sox only because they have more to spend.”

At least Mazz and I agree on something.

To suggest that the Red Sox never had a chance here is terribly simplistic and nothing more than an attempt by fans (and the Sox) to rationalize their failure in acquiring Teixeira. Nothing is ever that cut and dried — at least not when people are involved.

Did the Red Sox have a chance? Absent context, sure. Teixeira’s a Boras client, which roughly translated means he’s going to the highest bidder. Had the Sox bid more money than the competition, then, it’s likely that he’d be calling Fenway home. $200 million would probably solve whatever problems his wife had with my pseudo-hometown.

But $170M+ decisions are not made absent context. What Mazz doesn’t really discuss is what the player is actually worth, to us or to the Yankees. Whether he ignores that deliberately or by accident is unclear; either way, it’s a startling omission. The simple, inarguable fact is that $24 million means something different to their club than it does to ours. If the Yankees valued him highly, therefore – and there are 180 million reasons to conclude that they did – he was theirs for the taking. All the more so if his wife preferred New York all along.

To argue anything different is, dare I say it: “terribly simplistic.”