Maybe Brian McCann, pretty good acquisition and apparent nice guy, learned his first lesson about the Yankees on Thursday:
You need to be far bigger than an $85 million player to keep our attention in The Bronx.
While the Yankees’ decision-makers feted McCann at his introductory Yankee Stadium news conference, they fielded more questions about Jacoby Ellsbury, the $153 million man-to-be. And the most about Robinson Cano, the free-agent superstar who will surpass Ellsbury this offseason — be it with the Yankees, the Mariners or a mystery team.
As much as the Yankees have improved themselves in the short-term by getting McCann and Ellsbury, it feels like the Cano momentum is moving the great player and legendary team away from each other. Toward a lose-lose situation.
“We’re still talking,” Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner said, following the McCann news conference. “But obviously, we’re a decent distance apart, so we’re just going to have to see. Day by day. It’s all we can do.”
Cano traveled to Seattle Thursday to meet with the Mariners, and Seattle is set to offer the second baseman a nine-year contract for about $225 million. It’s closer to the sort of megadeal for which Team Cano, led by Jay Z and featuring CAA’s Brodie Van Wagenen, has been striving. Of course, they were hoping the Yankees would be at those kinds of figures.
And the Yankees aren’t there. They have chosen now to acquire religion, with the future of their best player in the balance and their focus still on getting under the $189 million luxury-tax threshold for 2014.
“I don’t know what the field’s doing and how they’re doing and what they’re willing to do. I just know in the end of the day, we’ll have, or have already, put forward offers that we are very comfortable with, and higher where we thought we would be to try to retain him,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said. “At some point, based on all the information he receives, [Cano] will make decisions for himself and his family. All I can tell you is we hope it’s us, but we can’t guarantee it.”
So we really could see a scenario unfold in which the Yankees lose out on the winter’s best free agent — their own guy, for crying out loud — and Cano commits himself to irrelevancy in the Pacific Northwest. Given how much Jay Z has emphasized Cano’s viability as a marketing icon, it wouldn’t serve his purposes to direct Cano to a bad, poorly-located club. Although the only worse development might be accepting the Yankees’ current offer, one far from $200 million.
No one owns the moral high ground in any financial stalemate. From a tactical standpoint, though, who deserves more blame here? I’ll go with Cano’s side. It’s the agent’s job to create a market, much as Scott Boras just did for Ellsbury. Maybe the Yankees would bend more had Cano presented them with a superior offer from a more threatening organization than the Mariners.
That will be microscopic consolation for the Yankees if they let Cano get away. They’ve turned their catching and outfield into 2014 strengths, yet without Cano, their infield becomes a significant weakness — and we haven’t even gotten into their currently dilapidated pitching staff.
The Yankees can have themselves Ellsbury, can pray he doesn’t get injured again and, if he does, his recovery time is fast enough to not frustrate teammates or superiors — as occurred with Ellsbury and the Red Sox in 2010. And Cano can maintain his Iron Man ways, playing in 160 games every year for a club that will need considerable help just to get to .500, and wondering what could have been if he had just stayed with the Yankees.
It isn’t too late for either side, or both, to blink. However, the momentum doesn’t seem headed that way.
“Robbie has been a great Yankee. Robbie is a great player,” Steinbrenner said. “We’re going to keep plugging away at it until it either happens or it doesn’t. There are only two options, right? There are only two possibilities here.”
There are two possible outcomes, agreed. The one that is gaining steam will leave no one looking like a winner.