Yankees Should Know the Drill

For many years running, whenever the New York Yankees and Bernie Williams were talking about money, some Yankee executive invariably would lament the fact that their players all seemed to have contentious and experienced agents such as Williams’ man, Scott Boras, agents who were interested in squeezing the last dollar out of them. There was hope for an easier time with Derek Jeter, who has from the start employed the amiable, youngish Casey Close, seemingly the antithesis of Boras.

However, now that the Yankees are into their first real negotiating season with Jeter and Close, that hope is fading. Close never came close to accepting the Yankees’ best multiyear offer last spring, a five-year, $25 million bid that seems downright puny now, and Close recently expressed displeasure (bordering on outrage) with the way the talks were going.

If this keeps up, the Yankees might want to reconsider their past thinking.

Maybe the problem isn’t the agents. Maybe it’s the Yankees.

General Manager Brian Cashman isn’t talking much now about what’s happening with Jeter’s contract talks, which is Cashman’s prerogative. However, what we do know about these talks makes us wonder whether the Yankees are approaching this in the right way. Maybe the Yankees are repeating the mistakes of the Williams’ talks.

And there mistakes made in Williams’ case.

Those mistakes did not ultimately cost them Williams, but it did cost them millions. If the Yankees had merely accepted Boras’ $77 million request last winter (rather than acting outraged about it), they would have committed $18.75 million less for Williams than the $95.75 million they wound up contracted to pay Williams ($8.25 million for 1998, plus $87.5 million).

The Yankees’ front office, with Cashman as point man, generally has done a brilliant job. They won 125 games last year, and they return one of history’s greatest teams minus only Tim Raines.

The front office is so together that competing executives and agents marvel at the stark change. Last year’s team avoided controversy like almost no other recent Yankees team, and there is reason to expect more of the same placidity. Heck, they even managed to turn around wacky David Wells.

If they handle Jeter the right way, we chronic nitpickers might have nothing to nitpick about. However, the early signs are not good. Upsetting Jeter is not the way to go.

Yankee people are lining up comparables in case they do go to arbitration with Jeter, and two names that leaked out made me laugh. John Valentin and Mark Grudzielanek.

If they want to compare Grudzielanek with Jeter, their calculator must work a lot differently than mine. As far as Valentin goes, if you use statistics selectively, you can build an extremely weak case. In his first three years, Valentin, before he started slipping and sliding his way to third base, averaged .295 with 16 home runs and 73 RBI, compared with .309, 13 and 77 for Jeter. However, Jeter averaged 22 stolen bases and 116 runs, helped win two rings and finished third in MVP voting his third season. Valentin averaged nine stolen bases, 70 runs and no rings.

Yankee executives are expressing great faith in their case, and that faith is exemplified by their recent one-year offer of $3.5 million, only $300,000 more than the figure they submitted and $1.5 million short of Jeter’s figure. (Valentin, incidentally, made $2.67 million his fourth year, 1996).

Close said he had heard the Yankees were planning to invoke Valentin’s name, and he declined comment about it. Cashman said he doesn’t want to discuss the Yankees’ case publicly.

If Valentin is their case, they shouldn’t discuss it privately, either. According to an executive not with the Yankees, the use of Valentin shows that the Yankees are “making the same mistakes they made with Bernie. If they go to arbitration and start making arguments like that, they’re in deep. They’re going to lose. They’re going to lose the case, and they’re going to lose Derek Jeter. They’re going to lose their Times Square Billboard.”

Losing Williams would have hurt. Losing Jeter would make grown men cry. Cashman won’t say it publicly now, but he has to know that Jeter their marquee player.

Close and Cashman cleared the air Wednesday after Close said publicly that “Derek has more confusion than anger” but sounded himself as if he had some of both emotions. Close was upset because Cashman expressed a desire to do a multiyear deal but didn’t follow up as Close expected.

“To get a multiyear deal done, you have to have talks,” Close told Newsday. “The messages are not consistent.”

Speaking of a multiyear deal, Cashman said, “If we don’t get it done, it’s not that we didn’t try.”

The Yankees will have to try harder than they did those first three winters with Williams. Going year by year starting with the 1996 offseason, the Yankees offered Williams $20.5 million for six years, $24 million for four years and $35 million for five years. A few months after they went to $24 million, we recommended they go to $40 million. Yankees people didn’t think much of that suggestion.

To this day, Cashman won’t admit they goofed on Williams. “No,” Cashman said, “because at those moments, the comfort wasn’t there. So we can’t second-guess ourselves.”

Still, if they had tried a higher offer earlier, maybe they could have saved some bucks. And some heartache. In big contract talks, the Yankees often seem too stubborn for their own good.

Cashman pointed out that not every longterm deal works. He mentioned Jim Abbott, Marty Cordova and Wilson Alvarez, to name three out of about a hundred that didn’t work. Yet the Indians and Angels have managed to lock up the right young stars. California saved itself tens of millions with its deals for Jim Edmonds, Tim Salmon and Troy Percival. The non-Yankee exec said they ought to try $50 million for five years for Jeter.

Going year to year “doesn’t make any sense,” Close said. The Yankees can do it because they can afford it, but he’s right, it still doesn’t make sense.

“When you you commit to (a multiyear contract), you have to be very sure of the type of person you’re dealing with,” Close allowed.

There should be no uncertainty in this case.