Lindbergh Reference or ABA Reference?
There've been so many strange happenings across the MLB rumor season—Albert Pujols leaving, Prince Fielder not going anywhere, the St. Louis Cardinals suddenly becoming major secondary-free-agent players—that the latest flare-ups of the dying Hot Stove League have almost stopped surprising me. One thing that does: If you believe the rumors coming out of multiple free agency situations, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees are just about out of money.
I don't know how it happened either. The Yankees spurned expensive, Yankee-type starter Edwin Jackson in favor of trading for young, cost-controlled Michael Pineda and signing one-year bargain Hiroki Kuroda, and now they might be too poor for a DH, though much to my chagrin I can't imagine them settling on, say, Jack Cust or J.D. Drew. Meanwhile, the Red Sox, really the last team clearly in the running for Roy Oswalt, would have to move payroll to get his remarkably cheap one-year/seven-figure demand into their budget.
The new CBA must be cramping the part of their collective style that involved offering enormous deals to A.J. Burnett and John Lackey. It's probably a good thing, but I'm still finding it difficult to deal with.
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Edited by Dan Moore
Dan Moore has been writing about baseball on the internet since that was a novel thing to do. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he lives in Springfield, Illinois. See my profile
