Good Riddance, Mark Teixeira
It’s official now: Mark Teixeira has a new home, up north in the House That Steinbrenner Built. He’s a Yankee, and Orioles fans are suffering from a gigantic case of blue balls.
And so I plead again for perspective. I think we’re all guilty (here and at every other site discussing the Teixsteria) of letting our emotions put the cart before the horse.
Come on: we basically knew he wasn’t going to sign here unless the O’s made him a blockbuster offer he’d have been crazy to turn down. Instead, the team made a very fair initial offer ($20 million/year is more than a token) and then indicated a willingness to bump it up. From what I’ve been able to gather, Boras never really engaged them on it. So Teixeira ends up with the Yankees, the place that, a year or so ago, we all figured he’d end up anyway.
We’re upset because the emotional weight of having the Severna Park kid ride in on a white horse and restore our franchise to glory created such a compelling narrative that we couldn’t help but get caught up in it.
But maybe ‘Ol Tex gave us a holiday gift after all: the gift of understanding. About who he really is, about how the system works (and doesn’t), and about what kind of team we hope to someday follow into the playoffs. All of those things are spread out before us, and I feel as though a great burden has been lifted.
It’s up to Andy MacPhail now to take that understanding and use it to continue to mold this team. Nothing about the Teixeira drama changes the fundamentals. It’s time to sign some pitchers (and maybe an Adam Dunn?), keep developing the minor league talent, and put a team on the field in ‘09 that shows signs of continuing the progress we witnessed in ‘08.
It’s a tough pill to swallow at first, and I have a hunch we’ll be seeing some serious desolation at the Yard this summer. So be it. We all knew it would take 2-4 years for the Orioles to return to respectability, and we’re entering year #2. Call me what you will, but I don’t see why the expectations have suddenly changed. I still see and want the same things.
If you’re still feeling down, though, give this article a read.
Is that really the guy on whom you want to pin your hopes for this team?
I’d prefer to pin them on Markakis, Guthrie, Jones, et al. And for the moment, I still don’t have any reason to believe that The Plan won’t work.
You know what the sickest part of this farce has been? That I totally expected every last detail of this. It happened exactly the way I knew – somewhere deep down – it would. And I still let myself believe it wouldn’t go down like this: with Mark Teixeira in fucking pinstripes. Like a dog coming when called.
So, tomorrow I’ll pick myself back up and dust myself off, and criticize the Orioles for not being more aggressive (although if there’s one thing I’ve read that really struck me, it’s this: “We could have gone the same route as the Nationals,” said a team official, “and it would have ended the same.”), and then ponder how we can ever get out of this mess, and then I’ll go to the store and buy a Calgary Flames hat and a Tampa Bay Rays hat. Then I’m going bowling. Eventually I’ll get over it.
But tonight, here’s my toast to the newest Yankee, Mr. Mark Teixeira.
Mark,
Fuck you, you pinstriped prick. You know how to manage your image perfectly, and how to make the perfect amount of money. You always said the right things about how it would be “a dream come true” to play for the Orioles. Yeah right, dick-scraper. You say you grew up rooting for the Orioles, but all I see is another traitor lured by the promise of rings upon rings. I hope it strikes you at least a little bit on Opening Day the way the very same fans you once were treat you. You’re Public Enemy #1 to your own past, and our present.
I could go on, Mr. Teixeira. It won’t matter. You’ll probably buy at least one of those precious championships in Yankee Pinstripes – and there’s nothing I can do about it. But I can write here, and I can say this:
Fuck you. I can’t believe I ever wanted a Yankee on my team.
Of course, it means nothing to you. You’re a Yankee, scum of the earth.
Love,
Andrew
I’m not down.
And I think I have it in proper perspective.
Ravens vs. Jaguars this Sunday at 4:15 pm. We win, we’re in the playoffs.
The Boras/Tex circle-jerk is over and we lost. Again. But, hey, at least we didn’t spend any money in the process.
Let’s just focus on the football team and we’ll worry about the baseball team in April or May or whenever the season starts.
Tomorrow I’ll spread my message of hate to the Warehouse and Bud Selig. Then I’m done, and probably going to take a break from things. But yeah, there’s a ton of blame to go around. Tex – who didn’t want to be an Oriole at all, it turned out – was just first because the Yankees are always number 1 in my hate book.
And let’s fucking take care of business on Sunday. It’d be cathartic.
I have never loved football so much.
For the record, I don’t blame the FO at all. I don’t see the Orioles as any way shape or form responsible for Tex getting away. Tex wanted to be a Yankee, Boras wanted him to be a Yankee… all they had to do was convince the Yankees they needed him. Good job, it worked. I don’t think a 10/200 deal would’ve gotten him here.
True that, DtM. True that.
The Loss Column won’t be shutting down completely for the holidays. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I’m preparing to launch the new design. But I do anticipate that we’ll slow down a bit, and I think that we’ll probably put Baseball Rumor Talk on hiatus for awhile.
I’ll say this, though: I heard from someone with knowledge of the talks tonight who said that, basically, Teixeira never had any intention of signing anywhere but the Yankees. Apparently he and Boras worked everyone else for their best offers, then went to the Yanks to seal the deal. The word is that there’s pretty much nothing anybody (save for maybe the Sox) could have done to change that.
So, fuck Mark Teixeira. I feel like I know enough to comfortably say that, and in fact I’d be happy say it to his face (are you out there, Mark?). He played us, he played Angels fans, he played Nationals fans, he played Sox fans, and he played baseball fans everywhere. That, apparently, is just the kind of guy he is.
I don’t blame it on Boras, either. That guy may be a jerk but he still works for the player. This is on “Tex”.
Time to decompress and enjoy some holiday cheer. Look for some kind of post tomorrow, then a break.
@Greg: nice timing!
By the way, @AooR: “You’re Public Enemy #1 to your own past, and our present” is a great line. Nice work, man.
hey neal explain how the orioles aren’t screwed and baseball isn’t comlpete bullshit.
i’d really love to hear it.
and by screwed i mean fucked up
Is it possible, at all, to both understand and agree with Andy MacPhail’s reasoning, as well as disagree and be angered by it? I think it is! Firstly, yeah, it looks like Tex did in fact play everyone so he could be a member of his beloved Yankees, and it really doesn’t seem like he even gave the Orioles a thought, so why should Andy have gotten into a bidding war he couldn’t have won -(my reasoning from early this week makes me generally agree with the decision not to sign Teixeira. If he didn’t want to be here anyway, he wasn’t coming here and we just had to accept that. And yeah, I’m not sure if he’s worth anywhere close to the money he got – BUT the way contracts have exploded in recent years, within 4 years it’ll look like chump change and he’ll be a bargain for the New York Homewreckers. But today he’s another overpaid guy, and I can definitely see the wisdom of not signing him.
But then I read that MacPhail wants us to be like the Twins and the Rays, and that we can’t afford to invest that much capital into any one player. Do you hear that, Nick Markakis? How ’bout you, Matt Wieters? I guess I should be happy with the idea of being the Rays as opposed to the Orioles, but if we’re unwilling to pay the going rate for our free agents-to-be, we stand no chance of actually building a core of players, and we certainly will NEVER compete in the AL East.
For all his blusteriness, Drew’s right about at least one thing: where is all this MASN money going? Regardless of how much you or I give monthly or whatever, RSNs (of which only the Mets, Yankees, Orioles, and Red Sox own) are supposed to generate tons of money. Where is it going?
As a fan, Mr. McPhail, you’re asking me to suffer at least 2 more awful seasons, bringing my total to 13 straight (and I only picked up baseball in ‘93…oh, where have you gone Mike Devereaux, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you…). You’re asking me to accept that we can’t deviate from “The Plan”, which I assume is building the farm system. And I’m okay with it – if it works. What I can’t abide is you doing all of this without at least having the sense of mind to tell us, the few loyalists remaining, what you’re doing with the money you do have and what exactly is the endgame for “The Plan”. In fact, you haven’t told us anything, Mr. McPhail.
I demand some transparency!
The system is a joke. Neal, I told you I’d sleep on it and I did, and I still feel the same way. I’ll repeat this fact: The Yankees have the four highest paid players in baseball. That’s literally impossible in any other sport. From a strictly rational team strategy perspective, I totally agree with you Neal, not signing Teixeira (I will never call him Tex again) is not that big a deal. (And thanks for that article link. He is now my most hated player.) But from a broader perspective it highlights everything that is wrong about baseball, and particularly life in the AL East.
We are in a division with two teams that will ALWAYS spend the money and buy the players necessary to win. It’s fine and good to say we have The Plan and such, but unless all, or at least most, of our prospects develop, we are screwed. We all know the recent Orioles past is littered with prospects who have not developed, and look where that’s left us. The 2001 draft is a perfect example. The Rangers draft Teixeira, we draft Chris Smith. Now that draft pick probably made a lot of sense at the time. My point is that one of the three – Arrieta, Tillman, and Matusz – is pretty much guaranteed to fail or at least be mediocre. That’s just logic and percentages. You can only do so much with your prospects to fill out your team. (The Rays had to lose for 10 years and draft consistently well to get where they are. That’s the ONLY way they were successful, by losing for that long and having luck with their draft picks.) What teams like Boston and NY do is fill in their gaps with talented, very highly paid players. Teams like the Orioles fill in their gaps with mediocre, very average-ly paid players. With this model, they will NEVER compete in the AL East.
Waiting for players to develop is a crapshoot, and by doing that you take a chance that your few homegrown stars like Markakis and Roberts will lose interest in being on the team. They will leave and they will get signed by Boston or NY or some such team. It’s a vicious cycle. To win as a mid- or small market team in the MLB, you must be both very smart AND very lucky. It’s a flawed system.
I could write a ton more about this, but I’m done for a bit. Neal, you know how huge a fan I am of the O’s and baseball in general. It pains me to say it, but that interest is taking a big hit this offseason. And it has almost nothing to do with the Orioles themselves. (Although they have been neither smart or lucky.)
My problem with the system, to throw in with sci here, is this:
A strong front office should be rewarded for being intelligent and competent. For example, the Red Sox are run very, very well. Sure they throw around a lot of money, but they are where they are largely based on shrewd scouting and player development (Ortiz, Varitek, Pedroia, Wakefield, Youkilis, Ellsbury, Bucholz, Papelbon, Okajima, and Masterson are all derived from this very system. That’s a heck of a team).
The Yankees have shown no such skill or intelligence in their dealings. They just say “We need to resign this guy” or “This is the best free agent pitcher” and load up a truck with money. Their player development and scouting has yielded a few genuine stars like Chamberlain and Wang, but who’s on the Yankees right now because they pay the most? Teixeira, Rodriguez, Posada, Damon, Sabathia, Burnett, Marte, Matsui, Igawa.
I won’t devolve this into an argument of “The Yankees sign EVERYONE and that’s RUINING BASEBALL!” because, you know what, it’s absolutely their right and their job to do this. I don’t see a salary cap ever coming when all it would really do is reward billionaires like Jeff Loria who can’t open a wallet to give a starving man a buck, and penalize the Steinbrenners who actually donate a ton of money to improving their ballclub. They work within the system, and that’s good for them, I guess. But someone eventually has to say that this isn’t a sport anymore – it’s a goddamn Monopoly.
It won’t happen, not even if the Yankees win the World Series the next 8 years in a row. You’ve got guys on ESPN like Steve Phillips and Buster Olney who can barely contain their glee on camera – you’ve got owners making more money than ever before. You’ve got some semblance of parity in the last decade. It won’t happen.
And last thing, the fact that there are rules in place to ideally fight monopolies in baseball (I’m talking about the luxury tax, which is a joke, and the rule allowing only a specific number of type A free agents to be signed – I think it’s 3 or however many you’ve lost this year – which is also a joke) implies that on some level, Bud Selig is aware that this is a problem, but he feels that throwing some token gesture at it is enough. Far be it from Bud Selig to know that a problem in baseball exists and ignore it. That’s not his character at all.
Ok. I’m done, too. I’ve got to take a break from this stuff before I give myself an ulcer. And then, sometime after the New Year, we can start thinking baseball again. Until then, it’s all Ravens all the time. And one last time for kicks: Go fuck yourself, Mark Teixeira. I don’t expect you to understand how us Oriole fans feel, so just do us a favor and fuck yourself. Thanks.
I think this might be something we can only rationalize at the conclusion of the 2009 World Series. If the Yankees aren’t the World Champions, then really there isn’t anything to complain about. Second place is first loser. Yankees have consistently operated with a payroll higher than everyone else and they haven’t been to the World Series yet this century. I don’t know if it was posted here or not, but the Yankees payroll for 2009 is still less than the Yankees payroll for 2008. So what does that say?
New post up on the main page that touches on some of these issues…good stuff, everyone.