Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑14 Sep 2018, 7:49pm
When you put it that way, I guess the Yankees won 2018 going away and the Red Sox are, once again, fucked for a generation.
No...I think the Sox are having a season for the ages, and that's exactly what they hired Dombrowski to take big risks for. Those risks include cauterizing all of Cherington's bad signees with considerable brutality to enable a roster free from malingerers while the core is peaking. He has a 20+ years established method of betting on very short windows and airing out every cent of his payroll flex to go for broke during those short windows. It all comes--and every Sox fan should know this by now--with the stipulation that when the short window is closing that he has a very quick hook and will start breaking up the roster core with painful trades to re-establish all that spent payroll headroom to go looking for the next window. Because that's the only way to reload quickly without dead-or-dying money and/or emptied farm systems sucking the oxygen out of the team.
The upside is that they aren't the Dodgers, who stared at the coming repeat-offender lux tax death penalty rate thinking their window was a good 2 years longer than it actually was...re-signed everyone to max long-term contracts WHILE taking on more vet salary lard in acquisitions...and are now ultra-fucked because they're stuck in a fatiguing dogfight with a glut of fellow 85-win teams for the last playoff spot in one of the weakest NL races in recent memory while looking painfully past-prime. If you don't have a F.O. that acts fast and with some brutality at timing their windows and lux tax overpays, you drown and end up becoming the post-Amaro, Jr. Phillies for several years. And that's where the Dodgers are headed, because they hedged complacently against the inevitable march of diminishing returns with their tax status.
Sox fans who spent good dough on a Bradley jersey might not like it that Dombrowski's going to trade a franchise cornerstone or two in a blockbuster to get his payroll leeway back, but they'll get over player loyalty in a hurry when they realize that brutality is what's allowed him to for 2 decades keep reloading for a new 2-3 -year plan--regardless of which team he's at the helm of--without being asphyxiated by dead payroll like every team that wished too hard for a second bite at their window. The risk is that if they didn't have things come together post-Farrell like this he'd have to skip windows because of the sheer quantity of dead money left to launder in a season where the AA/AAA eschelons of the system were unusually thin...but getting favorable results out of those yuuuuuge risks is exactly why he makes the big bucks and is a mortal lock for the HOF.
The Yankees simply aren't competing head-to-head on that timetable. This wasn't supposed to be a "window" year, because this was the lux tax reset year and Cashman was never changing strides on that schedule. They're way ahead on both farm-to-star graduates and getting deeper-than-expected under the tax threshold during their expiration year as a result of the farm being stratospherically ahead of schedule, but they were not in a position to take on any '19 vet salary in midseason trades because this was not a window year. That's next year when literally every rostered player Age 31 and older is a UFA (Brett Gardner, Dave Robertson, C.C. Sabbathia, J.A. Happ, Neil Walker, Lance Lynn, Andrew McCutchen) and either goes by the boards or re-signs (e.g. Sabbathia or Happ if they want to put off retirement one more year) at a paycut. If they make good on a year-early entry into the window, great. But that was not going to ever deter them from going into a tax-free offseason carrying literally only Stanton, Chapman, and the disappeared/presumed-dead Ellsbury into the offseason as vet contracts with all 37 other spots on the Winter Meetings 40-man comprised of either arb-eligibles or pre-arb. Then take advantage by signing two or more of the Gregorious/Judge/Severino/Sanchez group to ultra- long-term deals before playing their hand in the Harper-or-elsewhere sweepstakes.
It's not the same as when both teams were head-to-head chasing the same type of window in the same year. Maybe that's why it seems like it's not that hot a 'rivalry' year or that they're not exactly playing for the same thing despite the oddity of BOS and NYY having the #1 and #2 records in MLB for most of the year to-date. It's because the respective F.O.'s are on such diametrically different plans for their windows. At the end of the day they're still head-to-head chasing the prize...but coming to blows from very oblique angles further askew from where they usually meet.
This AL year has been so extreme and bizarre somebody could write a good nerd book about it in the end. The only thing conventional about these playoff races is Houston looking like a prototypical younger-core defending champ...although even they are having an abnormally stronger all-around defending season than anyone in recent memory.
As always, my preference if there are no teams I like in it, I want the worst match-up possible for Fox. Watching Joe Buck try to do a game without celebrities in the crowd to captivate his interest is enjoyable just for his three-plus hours of bored agony.