Red Sox resemble Yankees more every day

By JIM DONALDSON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
You think New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman trashed his room when he found out the Boston Red Sox had outbid the Bronx Bombers for the rights to negotiate with Japanese superstar pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka?

You may recall that's what angry and frustrated Sox GM Theo Epstein did at his hotel in Nicaragua several years ago when he got the news that Jose Contreras had signed with the Yanks for what, at the time, seemed the excessive sum of $32 million.

That's chump change now.

Fifty-one million dollars.

That's what it cost, not to sign, but merely to obtain the negotiating rights to Matsuzaka, the 26-year-old right-hander for the Seibu Lions who has been likened to a Japanese Pedro Martinez _ a top-of-the-rotation starter with command of four batter-baffling pitches.

Actually, the Sox' ante was $51.1 million. But what's a mere hundred grand when you're talking about more than a hundred million?

Because that's what this deal is going to cost Boston before it's all over, figuring the Sox will insist on at least a five-year contract, and that Matsuzaka's uber-agent, Scott Boras, will land his client a minimum of $10 million a year to join Epstein's projected uber-team. But, for the moment, let's just focus on the $51.1 million.

That's more than three times as much as the total payroll last season of the entire Florida Marlins team. A team, by the way, that includes National League Rookie of the Year Hanley Ramirez (.292 average, 17 homers, 51 stolen bases) and rookie righty Anibal Sanchez, who threw a no-hitter while racking up a 10-3 record and posting an earned-run average of 2.83.

Now, why can't the Red Sox get young players like that?

Oh, that's right, Theo traded those two to Florida for Josh Beckett (16-11, but with a league-high 36 home runs allowed and an E.R.A. of 5.01) and veteran third baseman Mike Lowell.

Fifty-one-point-one million.

That's more than the entire payroll of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and the Colorado Rockies, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Kansas City Royals, too. It's almost as much as the Cleveland Indians, Milwaukee Brewers and Arizona Diamondbacks pay their players.

Fifty-one-point-one million.

It's exorbitant. It's outrageous. It's obscene. It's, it's, it's _ it's Yankee-like, that's what it is.

It's the sort of the thing the Yankees have become infamous for doing. It's what Red Sox fans for years have ridiculed their perennial archrivals for doing so often _ throwing money around in a blatant bid to buy a pennant.

Remember Larry Lucchino, Boston's CEO and team president, decrying "the Evil Empire" and how it extended "its tentacles even into Latin America" after New York beat out the Sox for Contreras?

Not that the Red Sox really could afford, so to speak, to be holier-than-thou when it came to spending money.

Yes, the Yankees long have been in a class by themselves when it comes to buying players _ their money-is-no-object stance in acquiring talent pre-dates by more than 50 years the infamous George Steinbrenner, in fact going all the way back to beer baron Jacob Ruppert, who in 1920 purchased a pitcher-outfielder by the name of George Herman Ruth from the cash-strapped Red Sox, thus laying the cornerstone for the Yankees' domination of the American League.

But Boston also has been throwing money around for decades, going back to the days when Tom Yawkey owned the team.

While New York's 2006 payroll of $194.6 million _ down from $208.3 million in 2005 _ far outdistanced every other team in MLB, Boston was second on the list, at more than $120 million.

Yet with the second-highest payroll in the game, the Sox still managed to finish third in the A.L. East.

Now Theo and the Sox are ready to drop another $100 million on one pitcher, in the belief that adding Matsuzaka to a starting rotation of Beckett, Jonathan Papelbon, aging ace Curt Schilling and ageless knuckleballer Tim Wakefield will enable Boston to win its second World Series in four years, after going 0-for-85 from 1919 through 2003.

Sox fans have to hope the highly expensive Matsuzaka will do much more for Boston than Contreras did for the Yankees.

Perhaps the memory of that highly expensive and largely unproductive signing is why Cashman took with equanimity Boston's incredibly costly bid to negotiate with Matsuzaka.

"We'll congratulate (the Sox) and move on," said Cashman, who had to be bemused that the Red Sox now are behaving in exactly the way they've been criticizing the Yankees for acting for so long.