It's really not about baseball anymore, Hal has made that clear. It's about business. So here I am as a customer of this business seeing record revenue, being told they can't afford (or its not smart) to sign star players. That's troubling to me... Because it's not smart for me to travel 8 hours and pay $400 to sit on the dugout when I could do the same thing up the street for $150 for a team that doesn't seem to have a problem spending like the Yankees do. It's not smart for me to pay for MLB Extra Innings when my local TV package comes with MASN. I feel like Hal is spitting in our face and trying to see who will come back. It's far too expensive to be a Yankees fan for me to take these excuses seriously.
AVG, hits, and gold gloves eh? Where would Manny have ranked in those same stats? DJ has one above average hitting season to his name. Last season he was 14% below average. In the 3 years before it, he was -6, +30, -9. The year before that in 149 games he was -34%. It seems like they're betting on a swing change making him Didi 2.0, we will see, but as of now, this guy is not a good hitter. To boot, his strikeout rate is 1% below Manny. YS is a different animal than Coors, he'll have left-center to play with but not as much outfield space overall.
It's good to see Betances settle above his projection. I'm curious to see what each side files for Severino (we filed at 4.4 mil, he at 5.25, taking the ace to arbitration over 800k...but we're saving money to take care of our guys right? OK...) I'll be interested to see how the team goes forward with Didi and Hicks. Wouldn't shock me at all to see Hicks get a big offer somewhere and leave with another year of our window wasted if everything doesn't go well this year. What worries me is how trash we looked when Judge went down, and the idea that we could've done something big to supplement that potential loss, or if Stanton gets hurt, but instead we're fixing problems with duct tape.
In more positive news:
https://twitter.com/BobKlap/status/1083780281759350784