By the time the winter meetings last year had gotten underway, the best free agent catcher, third baseman, outfielder, closer, and overall player had already been signed. It was the usual entertaining offseason: mediocre guys getting paid like Hall of Famers ($90 million for Torii Hunter????), crappy guys getting paid like All-Stars ($25 million for Luis Castillo over four years, with the Mets hurriedly trying to dump the contract less than four months later) and God-awful players getting paid like Legendary Heroes ($46 million for Francisco Cordero????!?!!!??). Things eventually got to be somewhat predictable, and painful at times (I'm looking at you, Andruw Jones), but still it was another fun and exciting Hot Stove season.
Flash forward twelve months to the dawn of the 2008 winter meetings, and the only notable free agent signing of the entire offseason has been Ryan Dempster for 4 years and $52 million. It's also worth mentioning that the team that gave him that contract, the Cubs, is now desparately trying to shed payroll elsewhere in order to scrape together enough pennies to pay for other ventures (yeah, the Cubs, like the third-most popular baseball team in the world, need to break open piggy banks to pay for high-caliber stars. Right, okay.).
The biggest (pun intended) indicator of how much things have changed has to be the CC Sabathia situation. The Yankees offered CC six years and $140 million in November, and he remarkably decided to wait and see if any offers came in from teams in his home state of California. If this was 2007, the Yankees would have said "Screw it" and offered him nine years and $220 million with player options for $40 million in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and also included a life supply of Big Macs, DQ Blizzards, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. But now? They're just waiting as CC tries to decide if he wants to go to a California team, which is CC's hidden way of saying, "I fucking hate New York and never want to play there; please, any California team, give me at least an in-the-ballpark offer so the Player's Union won't grind my ass into dust"--only it seems as if no California teams can even put together an actual offer for him. That's just ridiculous, considering that the Dodgers and Angels play in the second-biggest market in the country and the Giants currently have like a $40 million payroll (with $39 million of that owed to Barry Zito, btw). So CC will probably enter the year 2009 without a contract, unless he caves and signs with the Yankees just so that the Player's Union won't plant a bomb in his car.
I understand that the economic crisis is bad, but is it so bad that MLB franchises can't afford to take any chances on any free agents? I used to complain that it was only the Dodgers that were like this because of their penny-pinching ownership team, but I mean, really: has any other team spent the money to improve their situation at all? I have to answer no to that. Sure, this stalemate will probably end eventually, and CC will get his $100 million and Mark Teixeira will get his $180 million and Manny Ramirez will get his 3-year, $69-million contract from the Dodgers with a lot of money backloaded into the last two years (uh, you read this blog right Frank McCourt?). But that time probably won't come soon, and maybe late January will be the new early December this Hot Stove season. And that'll just suck for anyone who enjoys following it.
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