Blue Jays Are the Big Spenders at Meetings

This is a good time in baseball to be broke.

Or better still, to be hemorrhaging money, the way the Yankees supposedly are. Go ahead, try to come up with a better excuse for pushing back from the table at the overheated banquet the winter meetings already have become.

According to the New York Daily News, the Evil Empire lost between $50 million and $85 million last season, no small feat for a team drawing 4 million fans and raking in more than $300 million. But hand over $200 million-plus to meet payroll obligations, fork over another $110 million in luxury tax and revenue sharing payments, then picture the scene at Yankee Stadium next spring as The Boss wanders the concourse and lectures pretzel vendors, “Whoa there! Easy on the mustard.”

The newspaper report did quote a source saying about Steinbrenner, “Even George has his limits.” But what George actually has is a nice little shell game going that enables him to shuffle profits and losses between several entities -- the team, its holding company and the YES Network, for starters -- and keep all those limited partners happy.

Still, the timing of the report, coupled with General Manager Brian Cashman’s recent pronouncement that the Yankees will cut the payroll, suggests the Yankees might spend more time than usual on the sideline during baseball’s annual free-agent auction and swap meet. Even so, it’s not like their absence has detracted from the “GMs Gone Wild” performance unfolding in Dallas.

The Toronto Blue Jays, flush with an infusion of cash from owner Ted Rogers, just locked up Florida Marlin starter A.J. Burnett for five years and $55 million, barely a week after making B.J. Ryan the best-paid reliever in baseball history with a five-year, $47 million deal of his own. Burnett is 28, but he’s only 49-50 for his career. Ryan is 29, and his resume is even shorter: one year as a closer and 42 career saves.

Rogers seemed so thrilled with the deals that he promptly gave General Manager J.P. Ricciardi a three-year extension through 2010 -- that, or else the Blue Jays owner reasoned most of Ricciardi’s GM counterparts were even wilder.

After all, somebody gave Esteban Loaiza three years and $21 million, and he’s six years older than Burnett; somebody else gave Billy Wagner four years and $43 million, and he’s five years older than Ryan; and uberagent Scott Boras has barely had time to unpack the 500-page, four-color brochures he put together extolling his stable of clients.

The last time the winter meetings were held in Dallas in 2000, Boras only needed one such volume to make his year. He talked Ranger owner Tom Hicks into signing Alex Rodriguez to the most expensive deal in American pro sports -- 10 years, $252 million -- and Texas never recovered.

“We thought we had a player that would make us a top team in baseball for years. He was a special player,” Hicks told the Dallas Morning News, “but I didn’t know that was the top of the bubble cycle. None of us did.

“We thought this was continuing the progression,” he added. “We thought salaries might escalate like that for years.”

They did, of course, just not at the pace that Hicks set. That one contract still hangs out there the way that Bob Beamon’s Olympic long jump did: a breathtaking leap that would take decades to match. While major league baseball has never been more profitable -- nearly two-thirds of the teams operated in the black last season, compared with barely half just five years ago -- clubs are less likely to make long-term investments than they were in 2000.

Not that moving players has become a problem. Clubs that are genuinely broke can shed players at just about any pace they like. The Florida Marlins are staging their second fire sale in less than 10 years, offloading five position players and two pitchers in two weeks.

The lightened load even suits owner Jeffrey Loria’s travel plans. Having been rebuffed in his efforts to build a baseball-only stadium for his team in Florida, he’s already dispatched club president David Samson to scout new locations, particularly those willing to build him a new stadium. Samson expects to spend three to five months, starting his odyssey Tuesday in San Antonio.

“We’re not a free-agent pitcher,” he said. “We’re a team looking for a right fit.”

Considering what clubs are ponying up for free-agent pitchers at the moment, though, there are probably worse things to be.