Red Sox once again prove money still rules baseball

Bud Selig’s tenure as baseball overlord ends in a little more than a month, and with it he’ll take a legacy whose narrative he shaped through constant repetition. The game, Selig said again and again, is more competitive than ever because of its economic policies. Anyone can win.

Part of this is true. An expanded postseason, married with inherent October randomness, does allow for a greater feeling of opportunity. And yet every offseason, as the hot stove burns, the same sense washes over a game that tries to deny something that shapes it to the core.

Money still rules baseball more than it does any professional sport.

This is not a criticism. Just a reality reinforced Monday morning when Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval absconded the National League for long-term deals with the Boston Red Sox. Ramirez’s will pay him in the neighborhood of $88 million over four years with a vesting option in the fifth, a source confirmed to Yahoo Sports after FoxSports.com first reported it. Sandoval’s deal spans five years for around $100 million, according to CBSSports.com, though his agent continues to say a deal is not in place. While alternate options existed for both players, they ended up in a place worth ending up because the Red Sox are going to spend, and spending is the most certain way to gather the sort of talent that makes the dice role in October just a little friendlier.

As inefficient as free agency is – as much as it pays for past performance and ignores the vagaries of aging – it exists as a Band-Aid for teams that struggle at developing players and a weapon for those, like Boston, which excel at building a muscular farm system. Were the Red Sox not a financial behemoth, one of the sport’s three powerhouses alongside the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, they would see a perfectly palatable path to respectability through their wide swath of future major league talent currently in the minors.

For a team like the Red Sox, which over the last three years sandwiched last-place finishes around a World Series championship, the ability to swallow the risk of multiyear deals amounts to perhaps the greatest competitive advantage that exists in baseball today. If Ramirez bombs out at shortstop or left field or first base or DH or wherever the Red Sox end up using him, they will survive. And should Sandoval’s weight become an issue or his bat disappear or some other malady hit, they will again survive. The New York Yankees weathered a decade’s worth of bad contracts during their most generous days, and it’s been 22 years since they suffered through a sub-.500 season.

The amount of faith Red Sox ownership places in general manager Ben Cherington and his braintrust with these signings is staggering. Cherington now must execute trades from a position of extreme surplus. The Red Sox have David Ortiz at DH, Mike Napoli at first base, Dustin Pedroia at second base, Sandoval at third base, Christian Vazquez at catcher and the following players to fit among shortstop and three outfield spots: Ramirez, Yoenis Cespedes, Rusney Castillo, Mookie Betts, Allen Craig, Shane Victorino, Xander Bogaerts, Daniel Nava, Brock Holt, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Will Middlebrooks.

Perhaps surplus was the wrong word; that’s excess, and if the Red Sox struggle to flip it into something that will help their pitching staff, it is better classified as mismanagement. The easiest way for Boston to cull the surfeit is throwing together a package for Philadelphia ace Cole Hamels. The Phillies, sources said, believe Boston is their best trade partner, though the Phillies, it must be noted, are run with all of the self-awareness of an infant, so the construction of such a deal may be harder to achieve in reality than in the fantasy world in which they match up perfectly.

Anyway, Boston would prefer to bring back Jon Lester, one of the three remaining free-agent pitching jewels, whom the Red Sox tried to woo with a six-year deal. The money, in the $120 million range, won’t be enough to get it done, not with the Cubs, Cardinals, Braves, Blue Jays and Giants involved. The return of Lester would be a coup for the Red Sox, whose spending spree likely would end if he returns.

The money isn’t unlimited; at the moment, Boston doesn’t plan on taking on Lester’s expected deal of around $150 million and the four years and $96 million remaining on Hamels’ contract, even though financial flexibility exists to do just that. Cespedes is a pending free agent, and dealing him for a pitcher entering his walk year makes sense, particularly with the qualifying-offer system in existence for at least one more season. Napoli and Victorino walk after 2015, too, and the Red Sox can buy out Clay Buchholz’s option for a quarter of a million dollars.

With the amount of cheap talent soon to hit Boston – catcher Blake Swihart, second baseman Sean Coyle, shortstop Deven Marrero, third baseman Garin Cecchini and pitchers Henry Owens, Anthony Ranaudo, Matt Barnes, Brian Johnson and Eduardo Rodriguez – the Red Sox can take on plenty of big deals now or wait a year for the free-agent pitching bonanza of 2015-16: David Price, Jordan Zimmermann, Zack Greinke, Johnny Cueto, Jeff Samardzija, Hisashi Iwakuma, Doug Fister, Mat Latos, Yovani Gallardo, Rick Porcello and more.

Boston always will play in that market, even if the market doesn’t dovetail with its plans to avoid long-term deals with pitchers, because the Red Sox understand even in this offensively neutered environment, bats alone will not win championships. Such is the glory of being a big market in baseball. No matter how hard baseball tried to even the playing field, nothing short of a hard salary cap – which not only won’t happen but shouldn’t – will change the inequity.

In many ways, such an imbalance behooves baseball. The Kansas City Royals making the World Series is a far better story considering the hurdles they face. The Tampa Bay Rays’ run in the American League East and the Oakland A’s in the AL West and the Pittsburgh Pirates’ in the National League Central all embody superior management. There is value in that. There is excellence in that. In many ways, it saves them from so many of the mistakes made by the big-spending teams.

It also shuts them out of the market where frontline players play. The San Diego Padres always will hope against hope that someone like Sandoval decides to sign with them – and, when one does, they’ll pray he doesn’t falter, because a team with 20 percent of its payroll in a sunk cost is a team that needs everything else to go right for an October dance ticket. The Padres now turn to Yasmany Tomas, the biggest-impact bat left on the market, hoping the Giants, stung by Sandoval’s departure, don’t come and trump them.

Baseball law says the Giants will. For every Giancarlo Stanton deal – every low-revenue team ponying up big bucks for a guy – there are the Red Sox and Yankees and Dodgers and Giants and Cubs making it rain in the free market. In a game overflowing with cash, elite players who take the risk of going to free agency want their rightful piece. And even in the utopian baseball world Bud Selig wants to exist, that piece is still coming from just a scant few.

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