Bomber Bites With Jumping Joe–Not Signing Robinson Cano Still the Right Move

When Robinson Cano signed a 10-year, $240 million contract with the Seattle Mariners this off-season, most baseball insiders panned the deal for being too much money for too many years.  The contract blew the Yankees offer of $175 for seven years out of the water. The Yankees had been burned by giving long-term deals for players into their late thirties several times, most notably Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez and most recently CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira.  They were simply unwilling to extend their offer to 10 years.  Now, one season into Cano’s historic deal, the Yankee logic in not giving Cano ten years remains true and it’s clear that the Yankees made the correct choice for the franchise.

First of all, let’s be clear on Robinson Cano in 2014.  His power is down, just 12 home runs so far, likely due to playing half his games at Safeco Field and not Yankee Stadium, but is still having a tremendous year.  His slash line is .319/.386/.458 and has been good for 5.2 WAR.  He is still an All-Star and has powered the Mariners into the playoff race, where they lead the Yankees by 4.5 games for the final playoff spot.  The Yankees are undeniably a worse team without Cano this season, and his bat in the lineup would probably be the difference between golfing in October and playoff baseball.

Mandatory Credit: Chad R. MacDonald.

However, there are still nine years left on Cano’s contract that will pay him $24 million annually.  Cano may be worth the money this season, and probably even for the next two to four years, but the last six or seven years on that contract are going to get ugly.  Cano has already had his power marginalized by playing in Seattle, same as Adrian Beltre did before him.  Cano was never a speed guy so that part of the game was never there to start with.  He may be a Gold Glove-level defender now, but every defensive metric available shows that every player’s defense declines at the fastest rate as a player enters his mid-thirties and by his late thirties, nearly every major league player is a defensive liability.  Of course, if the plan is to DH Cano in the later seasons of the contract, that means you have a $24 million DH who no longer hits for power, meaning any significant drop off in batting average or on base percentage will significantly hamper a lineup.

There is a reason the Yankees refused to go higher than seven years.  That reason is Alex Rodriguez.  Rodriguez was coming off an MVP season when he signed his last contract extension with the Yankees.  He was one of the top of five players in the game, as was Cano when he signed last season.  Even before PED issues wiped out his 2014 season, his production had seen a precipitous decline due to injuries and age.  Perhaps Cano can stay healthy for the length of his contract, a huge if, even for a player as durable as Cano.  But even if he does stay healthy, would anyone honestly forecast him to be among the game’s elite players or even second basemen in 3 years?  How about 6 years?  And certainly not 9 years from now when he is the same age as Derek Jeter, the owner of a .260 average as he hobbles off into retirement.

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If Cano was playing for the Yankees in 2014, they probably would be looking forward to the playoffs instead of playing on the fringes of the playoff race.  However, the Yankees are not on the outside looking in because they did not sign Cano.  Blaming this season on Cano’s presence in the Mariners’ lineup and not the Bombers’ lineup would be a massive oversimplification of the season.  To do so, would overlook injuries that landed 4/5 of the starting rotation on the DL, underachieving hitters up and down the lineup including Carlos Beltran, Teixeira, Jeter, Brian McCann and the now unemployed Alfonso Soriano, as well the inability of mid-season pickups like Stephen Drew and Chase Headley to play up to expectations.  Same as the addition of Cano would have been a difference maker, so would a healthy rotation or a lineup of hitters performing like the back of their baseball cards say they should.

Any Yankee fan who bemoans this apparently lost season on the failure to resign Cano either has no concept of history and has forgotten the lessons learned by the Giambi and Rodriguez contracts, or has no frame of reference to look toward the future.  The same fans who bemoan the current state of the Yankees, rife with old players being paid exorbitant sums of money and failing to produce (such as Teixeira, Sabathia, McCann et al), cannot in good faith state that Cano’s contract would end up any differently from those ones currently occupying residence on the Yankee payroll.  Therefore, not signing Cano was in the Yankees best long-term interest last off-season, and remains so today.