Would Yankees have traded Mariano Rivera?

[Number5]

1 minute ago, OFFNY said:

o

 

Yeah, anybody can go on wikipedia and edit/change something, although Ruth's profile is currently closed to editing.

I often use wikipedia for a quick reference because most of the stuff on there is usually correct, but I also keep a grain of salt handy in the event of their occasional mistake(s).

 

o

But what about "If it's on the internet, it must be true"? 

[spiritof66]

Zach Britton is not Mariano Rivera. But even if he were -- and he might be, if he repeats his 2016 performance for another 15 years -- the two situations would be very different. Here's why, in my opinion.

For a long time, the biggest difference between higher-revenue and lower-revenue teams was the ability of the former to sign free agents by offering them the most lucrative contracts, especially because when it signs those contracts a team takes on financial risk that the free agent won't be worth what it's paying. The higher-revenue teams tended to have more of their player value invested in veterans who came up in other organizations, blossomed into stars and then hit the free-agent market. Infusing talent from their minor-league systems weren't as vital to those teams because, if they didn't have that talent, they could replace it with free-agent signings (or trades in which another team was seeking salary relief). And some of the talent that their systems did create was traded to acquire established veterans whose teams knew they would soon be departing in free agency. (I'm skipping over how the NYYs managed for years to have the level of their MiL talent inflated so they could trade it away.)

It's still true that higher-revenue teams have that advantage. But now there's another big, and IMO bigger, difference between higher-revenue teams and lower-revenue teams: a high-revenue team is far more able to hold on to its most valuable established players, after their periods of team control end, that it drafted, signed from outside the US or acquired early in their careers. If the RS or NYYs come up with a Mookie Betts or Gary Sanchez, they can be pretty confident that -- if they want to -- they will be able to extend that player (or sign him as a free agent) and he can be a RS or NYY for life.  A low-revenue team like the Rays or Padres or Royals can extend players, too, but only sparingly and very selectively -- and if a player chooses to go to free agency while still performing at a very high level, that possibility is probably gone, or at least becomes remote and hard to rely on when the question of whether to trade a player who is not willing to extend as he approaches the end of team control. 

This difference not only gives the higher-revenue teams an advantage on the field, but affects its relationship with the fan base. If you're a RS fan, you can imagine that you might be seeing Betts, Bradley, Bogaerts, Benintendi, etc. for a long time. That might not happen, but it might. If they had all come up with Cincinnati, on the other hand, the fans could be pretty sure that some of them would be moving on, maybe being traded after a few years if they made it clear they would seek free agency. Those fans would be hoping for a window of high performance and in many cases debating when the window should be deemed to have closed, not a decade or more of star performance for the Reds. It's a different ballgame.

Mariano Rivera was a unique talent in his ability to sustain excellence as a RP over a long period. The NYYs didn't have to think about trading him over his long career because they knew that if they wanted to keep him they would be able to offer him as much as anyone else -- and if that meant paying him for a couple of years when he was no longer producing (or was injured), they could handle that. (There is another side to this coin, I guess. These teams probably catch more flak from their fans when they choose not to sign a player who departs via free agency, like the RS did with Damon and Ellsbury, because the fans know they can afford it and are making a choice out of preference rather than economic necessity.) If Rivera had come up with Milwaukee or KC or Tampa it's very likely he would have been traded or lost through free agency.

The Orioles' situation with Britton is hard to read. Their basic revenues are probably slightly below the median, with poor prospects for increasing, and under most circumstances you'd think there's no way they will retain Britton after 2018, making the only question when to trade him. But the Orioles' financial situation is unusual. They don't spend on international development, have a unique profit center through the MASN deal that is in grave jeopardy, have made some strange commitments to position players (Davis and Trumbo) for a team in its circumstances, face a question about Machado's future, and have a decision-making process that includes an 88-year-old owner, apparently focused on the 2017-18 seasons, who both is reported to be indecisive and has shown himself capable of making foolhardy decisions. That's why it's been hard to predict what will happen -- and still is as we head to the wire.