For Yankee fans hoping Brian Cashman will trade a prospect or two to get a player like Justin Morneau from the Minnesota Twins to play first base until Mark Teixeira returns — if he returns — this season from a wrist injury, it might be useful to hear some recent comments from Hal Steinbrenner.
In an interview last week with Steinbrenner, the Yankees managing general partner, he talked about his conviction that the Yankees should be able to contend with a payroll under $200 million.
After listening to his reasoning, one comes away thinking it would take a lot to persuade him to give up prospects for a player such as Morneau, who would take the payroll to $223 million, as would be the case if the Yankees were to assume the $14 million Morneau is owed this year.
And this year's payroll matters. The Yankees are committed to getting below $189 million for the 2014 season in order to take advantage of significant financial incentives built into the collective bargaining agreement. But that does not mean the 2013 payroll can balloon to any amount. It is already at $209 million. And with their luxury tax payments at 50 percent, if they took on Morneau's full contract it could cost them as much as $21 million in real terms, with the luxury tax hit.
As my New York Times colleague Tyler Kepner points out, Minnesota is more interested in acquiring prospects than in getting financial relief. If they were to pay some of Morneau's salary, then they would want better prospects from the Yankees in return.
But Steinbrenner said he recalled how Don Mattingly became fed up by the early 1990s after the Yankees continued to trade good prospects in a desperate win-now philosophy, a practice that stretched back to the 1980s, when the team sent Jay Buhner to the Seattle Mariners in a deal for Ken Phelps.
"There were years when we certainly traded away a lot of young talent to try and get the big talent now and we did throw money at a lot of free agents," Steinbrenner said, adding of the 80s, "and a lot of those years didn't amount to anything."
Steinbrenner clearly wants the Yankees to continue to develop homegrown talent, because it has worked so well in the past. He mentioned how the mid-to-late 1990s teams were built with a combination of a select few free agents and a core of excellent young players.
"Look at '96," he said. "That wasn't only about the young kids. We had the David Cones and some pricey free agents. But we had a good mix of the veterans and the kids we developed, and that's what we've got to have."
That's not to say that Steinbrenner wouldn't consider trading prospects for established talent. It would just take some convincing.
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