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"/Santana is King of Queens but Shouldn’t Be//
By Sean Deveney
The Sporting News
Like it or not, you should at least be used to this by now. When a major move happens in baseball, it comes back to the Yankees and the Red Sox. Most people don’t like it. But in baseball, everything winds up getting sucked into the gravitational pull of the American League East’s twin suzerains. It’s just inevitable.
Last week, when ace lefty Johan Santana was traded from the Twins to the Mets, the question wasn’t how Santana wound up in Queens but how he managed not to wind up in the Bronx or the Back Bay. A bloodbath over Santana, who sports a 93-44 career record, a 3.22 ERA and two Cy Young awards, seemed a Yanks-Sox natural, and it appeared to be simmering in early December.
But, oddly, it fizzled. The day after the deal was announced, Rays executive vice president Andrew Friedman said, “It’s a happy day for us when someone like (Santana) doesn’t wind up in our division. It doesn’t usually go that way.”
Shame on the Red Sox and Yankees for letting Santana get away. Both can afford him. The Red Sox could have parted with center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury or left-hander Jon Lester. The Yankees could have forked over right-hander Phil Hughes. Both teams could have added prospects that would have dwarfed the final package the Mets gave the Twins.
Save the platitudes about the holiness of player development. Yes, it’s important to draft wisely and shepherd players through the farm system. That’s a small-market lesson the big guys have learned well. But for big-market teams, player development also involves trades. It means plucking sure-thing stars from small-market teams that can’t afford them. Sound cold, heartless and Machiavellian? So what? We’re talking championships, not charity.
Boston, at least, coming off two World Series titles in four years, can argue it doesn’t need Santana. Fair enough.
But the Yankees, who haven’t won a World Series since 2000, are in no position for thumb-twiddling. Rather than giving up Hughes and installing Santana as the ace, the team is banking on Hughes, Ian Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain to fill at least two spots in the rotation (perhaps three, depending on Mike Mussina’s effectiveness) behind Chien-Ming Wang and Andy Pettitte. Try to figure out how a team with a payroll of more than $200 million pins its hopes on three pitchers with 16 major league starts among them, at a time when one of the best pitchers in baseball was within reach.
It doesn’t add up. Boston could have sealed the East championship for three or four years with Santana. A Santana-ized Yankees pitching staff would have pulled the team back ahead of the Red Sox. But Johan Santana is a Met. Somehow, this deal escaped the Red Sox-Yankees pull.
It shouldn’t have. "
OK, what the heck? Where is it written that all good players must end up in Boston or with the Yankees?
If Santana DID end up with one of those two, would the same writer pen a column talking about how competitive balance is out of whack and "Woe to the market teams who are out of the race by Opening Day?"
Maybe, just maybe, the Skanks didn't go after him because they are already spending $218 million to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Maybe a better column would have been that is was a mistake to throw all that money at Skank-Rod, Posada and Rivera instead of at Santana.
Maybe he could have written that with Dice-K, Beckett and Schilling the Red Sox already have enough pitching.
He might also have mentioned that the Angels and Dodgers seem to throw a lot of money around, too.
I'm tired of this whole line of thinking that the only reason the Mets got him is that the Yanks didn't want him.
Hey, the market was open to all teams. Any of them could have made their offer. You telling me St. Louis couldn't afford him? Seattle?
The bottom line is that the Mets got it done. They had the resources, played the game and walked away with the player they wanted and needed. More power to them.
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