By 5 p.m. Friday, we’ll learn where Masahiro Tanaka will take his talents in 2014, then we can fully sort out the winners and losers of this sweepstakes.
Already, though, we have a big winner. And it isn’t anyone who will be signing the Japanese right-hander.
“It really wasn’t a small-market/big-market issue,” Frank Coonelly, president of the Pirates, told The Post Thursday at the Major League Baseball quarterly owners meetings in Paradise Valley, Ariz. “It was clubs, players, Japanese clubs. And I thought we were getting the short end of it and made a suggestion.”
That suggestion dramatically altered the dynamic of this offseason. And it could blow up two-plus years of Yankees planning.
Coonelly spoke up at the prior owners’ meetings general session on Nov. 14. MLB, the Players Association, Nippon Professional Baseball and the Japanese players’ union were far down the road in finalizing a plan that would have only tweaked the previous posting process for Japanese players. The Japanese player still would be limited to negotiating with just one major league team, the club which posted the highest bid for those exclusive rights. And that would give nearly all the leverage in the negotiations to the team.
NPB took too long to get back to MLB on that offer, however, and the owners’ meetings arrived. Then Coonelly raised his point and others concurred, and here we are with a dramatically different posting system. One in which Tanaka is close to a “true” free agent. As long as a major league team is willing to put up a $20 million posting fee to the Rakuten Golden Eagles, it can negotiate with Tanaka, who possesses such immense leverage his agent, Casey Close, has largely succeeded in muzzling teams from sharing details of their negotiations.
“I think it’s much better,” Coonelly said. “Because I think that putting some type of limitation on the posting agreement means that money that is really paid to secure player talent, more of it will be in salary.”
Which means far more of it will be subject to the luxury tax. Which impacts the Yankees most of all.
When the Yankees digested the parameters of the collective bargaining agreement signed by players and teams in November 2011, they hatched a plan: With the luxury-tax threshold increasing from $178 million in 2013 to $189 million in ’14, they would capitalize on that extra room for error and, by getting under, collect money in the revenue-sharing disqualification program as well as reset their tax rate from 50 percent to 17.5 percent.
Fast-forward to 2013. With the Yankees’ pitching prospects faltering all over, they looked to the Pacific Rim for a dual solution to their problems. Tanaka would boost their starting rotation, and he would do so at a price that fit their financial goal. Consider two years ago, Texas paid an un-taxable $51.7 million to the Nippon Ham Fighters to negotiate exclusively with Yu Darvish, and then a taxable $56 million over six years to the pitcher. Tanaka would cost a little more in each area. On the taxable side, he figured to require about $12 million annually, which is around what the Twins gave to the respectable yet underwhelming Ricky Nolasco.
Now? The Tanaka derby still involves the big-market teams, with the Cubs, White Sox and Dodgers viewed as the primary challengers to the Yankees. Yet Tanaka will easily surpass $100 million in his contract, so the signing team will feel the pain considerably more.
“I’m not looking to extract pain,” Coonelly said. “I think that any time you have a premier free agent, you’re going to have the teams in New York and Los Angeles that are always going to be interested.”
The Yankees, sore from a 2013 season in which they put up their worst winning percentage since 1992 and saw their attendance and television ratings plummet, aggressively signed free agents — most prominently Carlos Beltran, Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann as well as re-signing Hiroki Kuroda — to put themselves in serious jeopardy of going over $189 million. Independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz’s 162-game suspension of Alex Rodriguez restored the Yankees’ chances of financial salvation once more, but only if they don’t get Tanaka.
They’re at $170.058 million with 18 players plus A-Rod signed, and when you factor in the $11 million that must be included for benefits and $5 million for in-season call-ups, that leaves the Yankees with virtually no money to add a veteran reliever, let alone Tanaka. But if they somehow find a taker for Ichiro Suzuki and his $6.5 million, and if Brett Gardner and his $5.6 million salary end up elsewhere in a trade? Then they probably could have fit Tanaka and stayed below $189 million under the old rules. Not now.
“If we’re not where we need to be, we need to keep going,” Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner said this past week in Arizona.
The luxury-tax goal has not at all hindered their pursuit of Tanaka, Steinbrenner insisted, and an industry source said the Yankees have made a “very aggressive” offer to the 25-year-old. They would rather win on Tanaka and lose on their luxury-tax goal.
Small-market teams such as the Pirates can’t dole out this kind of money for one player. It’s only fair, though, that big-market clubs pay the full freight when they soar so high.