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Friday, December 05, 2008
Where should CC Sabathia go?
The answer is the Los Angeles Dodgers. I have a baseball blog, and I get to write in it sometimes. CC is from California, so he would like to be on the west coast. But that doesn't mean they *should* sign Sabathia, it just means they *can* sign Sabathia. The reason they *should* sign Sabathia is now is the time. They got so much talent, and they need that #1.
No one is talking about the Dodgers, because they're not interested in Sabathia, for a number of reasons. How did we get to this place?
I don't mean to dredge up old wounds, but we got to this place because Ned Colletti is an idiot. I don't know him personally, I'm talking about his performance as a GM. For all I know he solves differential equations to relax before bedtime. But let's talk about what's happened since he got the job.
No, that's too much. Let's talk about were we are. I'm not a Dodgers fan, by the way. We got a contract that pays 15 million dollars to Andruw Jones in 2009. We got a contract that pays 15 million dollars to Jason Schmidt in 2009. 19 million is still owed to them from their signing bonuses. Then they're off the books.
We got Juan Pierre on the books for 28.5 million dollars over the next 3 years. There's also the Kuroda contract, but that's reasonable. The rest of that stuff is wasted money. There's a theme here: players at the end of a strong peak, who are not likely to continue at that level, and carry a strong risk of completely tanking.
So who are they talking about now? This is bad. They're talking about Manny Ramirez and Rafael Furcal. The theme continues...
So where are we? Yeah. The Dodgers aren't signing Sabathia because they have so much money wasted on these crappers. And they want to throw a bunch of money at some more crap (talk to me in five years.) And that's their excuse. But they should say "Fuck it. We *need* Sabathia because we have a ridiculously talented core of young players. We need him to be the ace as they travel through their primes. We need to win a bunch of championships."
This has happened before with Joe Torre. It was the 1990's Yankees.
