On Momentum (Part II)

Free Agents are Never Free

Marcus Stroman, on national television, feeling the compulsion to post.

This is part two of my series on the depleted starting rotation of the New York Yankees, their metaphysical history, and the ghosts they must exorcise. If you haven’t, you can check out part one here.

Carlos Rodon

Profile: Age 31, 6-2, 255 lb

Contract: 6 years, $162 million, free agent in 2029.

Best Season: 2022, 158 IP, 163 SO, 2.44 ERA (161 ERA+), 4.4 WAR, AS, CY-8

2024 ZIPS Projection: 102 IP, 99 SO, 3.86 ERA, 2.0 WAR, 

Sports media like to imagine Yankees fans (and Cowboys, Lakers, and Duke Basketball fans), as spoiled bandwagoners, whose experience of consistent, imperial dominance, and the team’s willingness to dramatically outspend the competition, has brought an insufferable sense of entitlement.  I can’t speak to the other three maligned fanbases, but I think this is unfair to the current Yankee fan.  For one thing, we have not actually experienced much imperial dominance recently; we’ve won exactly one World Series in my twenty years of fandom, and have otherwise been good but not good enough, consistently in playoff contention but with too many glaring flaws to make a deep run.  As for the outspending, to me this reflects an anachronistic understanding of current Major League Baseball payroll norms. 

In the nineties and early aughts, The Yankees were led by an insane, Ahab-like owner whose singular desire to win championships, cost be damned, posed an existential threat to the more sober-minded (cheap) owners.  The Yankees outspent every other team by cartoonish proportions every year in those days, but George Steinbrenner’s been dead for more than a decade, and now, the Dodgers, Angels, Mets, Astros, Cubs, Cardinals, Giants, Phillies, and Padres all jostle with us for the top positions on the payroll rankings.  Meanwhile, league-wide revenue sharing from national broadcast deals, generous public subsidies for stadium upgrades, and redistributive luxury tax penalties have all combined to make it impossible to lose money owning an MLB team. 

This has created two classes of teams: the ones that try to be competitive every year, and the ones that refuse to on principle, that would rather lose as an act of self-destructive pettiness than acquiesce to the offensive idea that they should have to pay professional athletes tens of millions of dollars just to run around and play a silly game with a ball and a stick.  Yankees fans are entitled only in that we demand that our team try, that they spend at least a little bit of the money we give them on the on-field product, that they actually care a little bit about trying to win a championship.  I can’t imagine why someone would be a fan of a team that does not try.

However, it’s possible that there are times when we come across as ungrateful.  If the team chooses not to sign a marquee free agent, the fanbase is often outraged.  When we do sign someone (and we sign someone expensive almost every offseason), we breathe a sigh of relief, watch encouraging highlights of our new signing dominating in another team’s uniform, and then immediately begin our list of demands: “He better hit 45 home runs a year for the next five years and also win the Cy Young Award if we’re paying him that much.”  Yankees GM Brian Cashman does not get any credit or applause for spending the GDP of a midsize Pacific island nation on a new All-Star.  

After getting swept by the Astros in the 2022 ALCS, the conventional wisdom was that the Yankees needed one more elite starting pitcher in order to get over the hump into championship contention.  But it was hard to see how they would sign one.  Aaron Judge was a free agent, having just broken the American League all-time home run record in the greatest single season in twenty years.  If they could re-sign him, he would need a record contract, so the team needed to set aside money for that.  If they couldn’t, their window of championship contention would slam shut, and the team would have much less use for superstars in their prime, locked up on long-term expensive contracts.  A free agent all-star pitcher signing seemed unlikely either way.

And yet on December 15th, with the Judge negotiations still in limbo, the Yankees signed left-handed pitcher Carlos Rodon to a massive deal.  Rodon had just come off back-to-back All-Star seasons with sub-3 ERAs, five Wins Above Replacement each, and Cy Young Award voting finishes of fifth and sixth, respectively.  He received a six-year deal worth $170 million, making him the fourth-highest-paid pitcher in the league (behind fellow Yankee Gerrit Cole, the highest-paid at the time), and no one thought he was worth a penny less.  Rodon was 30, in his physical prime, with a nasty slider and a four-seamer he could place with pinpoint accuracy, coming off two dominant seasons.  He was also a fan-favorite, loud and emotional on the mound, frequently roaring with triumph at the dugout or rage at the umpire.  He would surely be a perfect fit on the 2023 Yankees, and the Cole-Rodon duo, collectively paid more than the entire 2023 Oakland A’s roster, would surely be the best one-two starting pair the league had seen in years.  

Instead, Rodon injured his forearm in Spring Training and couldn’t get back into shape until July.  And when he finally returned, he was shaky, and unable to make it past the sixth inning.  “He needs time to get back into a rhythm,” we were assured, time that the Yankees did not have, as their record entered free fall and their playoff chances evaporated.  He never got there, finishing the season with a gaudy 6.85 ERA on 14 starts, in which the team went 2-12.  Along the way, his fiery demeanor curdled into something much less attractive.  He started pouting and stomping around on the mound, yelling back at fans that booed him after bad starts, and on his last start, dramatically turned his back on pitching coach Matt Blake during a mound visit.

There’s still reason for hope this year.  Rodon had a decent spring training, is completely healthy, and is only fifteen months removed from being one of the league’s very best pitchers.  The argument for him is the inverse of Nestor’s: just as it is ridiculous for a bad pitcher to all of a sudden become sustainably incredible, it seems implausible that a consistently elite one instantaneously and permanently became a bad one.  Surely there will be some positive regression towards his previous heights. If there isn’t though, the Yankees are in bad shape.  They have five more years of Rodon, and at $27 million a year, he is the fourth most expensive player on the roster (he’d be the most expensive on 17 of the 29 other teams).  Juan Soto (and Gleyber Torres) enters free agency next year, the Yankees are staring down a period where they can ill-afford to have another $27 million-a-year albatross on their payroll.  If he doesn’t return to form, it’s not hyperbole to imagine that Carlos Rodon could prevent the Yankees from their next dynasty.  

Either way, I’m always puzzled when fans get mad at Cashman for not being aggressive enough, for being too cute, for eschewing the obvious big-ticket moves, and spending too much time hunting around for tiny specs of value in the bargain bin.  He makes plenty of obvious moves too!  In the winter of 2022, he went out and signed the best free-agent available, to the massive, long-term contract that he demanded.  You can blame him for not scouting Rodon better, for not being able to predict that he would strain his forearm and lose his temper.  But the reasoning was sound.  Would fans have really preferred that Cashman signed an affordable, short-term aging veteran instead, with high upside but a shaky record and obvious issues?

Marcus Stroman (An affordable, short-term, aging veteran with high upside but a shaky record and obvious issues)

Profile: Age 32, 5-7, 180 lb

Contract: 2 years, $37 million (third year player option, free agent in 2026 or 2027)

Best Season: 2017, 209 IP, 164 SO, 3.09 ERA (145 ERA+), 5.1 WAR, CY-6

2024 ZIPS Projection: 138.0 IP, 110 SO, 4.04 ERA, 1.7 WAR

Marcus Stroman has always wanted to be a Yankee.  This is usually endearing to fans, and it is a testament to Stroman’s obstreperousness that he has managed to turn even this into a PR demerit.  It’s actually impressive, the equivalent of managing to make your officemates hate you for bringing in homemade cookies too often.  Here’s how he did it.

In July of 2019, Stroman was an ideal candidate for a midseason trade to a contender: off to an excellent start, on a terrible and cheap team (the Blue Jays), with only a few years of team-control remaining.  The Yankees, as always, needed another starter to round out their rotation, and Stroman, a Long Island native and  a lifelong Yankee fan (surprisingly, since Long Island is Mets territory), was reportedly eager to join.  At the last second, the Yankees balked at the Blue Jays’ asking price, and Stroman was traded to the Mets instead.  The day the news of this trade broke, Rob Longley of the Toronto Sun reported that the Blue Jays closed the locker room to the press, because of a “commotion,” which was “caused by outgoing Marcus Stroman, sources confirm. Word is his initial reaction to trade was not pretty.”  I can understand how this might be annoying for teammates, but frankly I found this to be incredibly relatable.  I too would throw a tantrum if I found out I was being traded to the Mets instead of the Yankees.

But things took a turn for the worse later that year, when Cashman publicly explained his reasoning, and said that he didn’t think Stroman would be a “difference-maker” in the postseason, and that he would slot in the bullpen behind the rest of the Yankees starters.  A year later, Stroman went on an extended Twitter tirade, calling Cashman an idiot for not picking him up.  “Besides (Gerrit) Cole, there’s no current Yankee pitcher who will be anywhere in my league over the next 5-7 years. Their pitching always folds in the end,” he tweeted.  Then, he liked a tweet by Jared Carrabis, a Red Sox fan influencer and idiot for Barstool Sports, in which Carrabis called Gerrit Cole a baby.  When random fans started to express their disagreement, Stroman was active in the replies, telling them that “You mad because that crazy payroll continues to let you down year after year? Get off my page and go communicate with the front office bitter boy. Lmao 🤡😂,”.

This is all quite true.  I am mad because the crazy payroll continues to let us down year after year.  But it’s unseemly for a professional athlete, actually in the league and making tens of millions of dollars a year, to be getting into this with an anonymous stranger in public.  He shouldn’t have cared what the Twitter user YankeeFan 4Ever said about him online, and he certainly shouldn’t have let the world know this, just as he probably shouldn’t have been quite so publicly upset about being traded to the Mets.  Players are traded to the Mets every year, and most of them manage not to react this way.  Some of them even manage to convincingly feign excitement about the prospect, despite their lifelong Yankee fandom.

Stroman and Cashman have publicly made up since the signing in January, and Stroman seems to have logged off for now.  But the stench of being too online does not wash off so easily.  Despite the cliche you hear hundreds of times a season that “not everyone can play in the Bronx,” in my lifetime, I’ve seen successful seasons in pinstripes from happy players, sad players, loud players, angry players, stoic emotionless robots, and even insane masochistic sickos.  But dudes who post too much on Twitter do not do well here.  The Yankees are still reeling from their two-year partnership with former MVP Josh Donaldson, who despite obediently logging off when he joined the team, was a nightmare, with an abysmal batting average, repeated bat flips on routine fly-outs, needless antagonization of mediocre opponents, and generally awful vibes, all at an exorbitantly expensive price tag.  Stroman may turn out to be great (he hasn’t given up an earned run yet in two starts).  But for a pitcher of his caliber, there’s a reason that the Yankees could sign him to a relatively cheap contract, and it’s not just his age.  It’s the downside risk of signing a terminally online Major League Baseball player, which as the Yankees know all too well, can debilitate vibes for an entire season.  Let’s hope he stays logged off.