At Home Plate - Soriano deal relapse into bad habits for Yankees

At Home Plate

Soriano deal relapse into bad habits for Yankees

Written by Bjoern Hartig (Contact & Archive) on January 15, 2011

Rafael Soriano closes out a game.

Photo by gayle kingston, used underĀ creative commons license.

The Yankees have signed reliever Rafael Soriano to a three year, $35 mill. contract to set the table for Mariano Rivera. Now I do not dislike this move in general. If there is one team that can afford to spent that kind of money on a set-up man, it is certainly the Yankees. Plus, they did strike out on starter Cliff Lee and adding Soriano to the pen allows them to move Joba Chamberlain back to the rotation, which looks rather weak at the moment. Also, Soriano was a type-A free-agent, which means that the Yankees gave up their first round pick in the upcoming amateur draft, although, again, the Yankees are the team that can absorb this best as they can go above slot money for talent or spent on international free agents. Overall not a particularly smart move in my opinion, but it is obviously not going to break the Yankees.

Now what makes this move problematic is that it does not look like an idea of GM Brian Cashman, who has tried to move the organization into the direction of developing from within and use the enormous budget more efficiently. This deal is probably a panic reaction of the Steinbrenners, who saw the moves made by the Red Sox and desperately wanted to send a signal to the fans. If this is the case, it could herald a new area of ownership meddling with front office decisions, which if you remember, does not always work out that well.

On the bright side, bad news for the Yankees means good news for the rest of baseball.

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