Eating Your Own Cooking

Beofre the 2008 season, the Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10-year, $275M contract. After this season the Yankees will still owe A-Rod $86M over 4 years, with the (increasingly unlikely) potential for another $30M in performance bonuses for hitting certain historical Home Run milestones. But the Yankees may be thrown a lifeline by Major League Baseball which wanted to ban A-Rod for life for his involvement in the BioGenesis scandal. But now MLB wants him to accept a ban for the rest of this season and all of next. We don't know exactly what evidence MLB has against A-Rod, but no matter what it is, a lifetime ban would be so far above the punishment for other recidivists (Braun, Colon, Manny Ramirez) there seems to be more at play here than just wanting to punish a cheater. If the Yankees are freed from the liability of paying A-Rod, not only would it clear up $86M on their books it would get them under a certain luxury tax threshold which would prevent them from paying an extra 40% on the overage. That would be a huge advantage for the Yankees and the worst bailout since the financial crisis. If the league does decide to take this extraordinary step of banning A-Rod, and the Yankees don't have to pay his contract, his salary should still count against their luxury tax number. I can't believe the clubs' revenue sharing agreement doesn't include a stipulation to this regard. It seems like the mostly likely outcome here is for A-Rod to miss the rest of this year and all of 2014, which would still keep the final four years of his contract on the Yankees books, which I'm ok with, though I still thing salaries of suspended players should count against their teams for revenue sharing purposes. If not, it's almost an incentive to sign cheaters, because if they get caught you don't have to suffer any consequences. With these new suspensions and new enforcement methods, I think this is something MLB definitely needs to consider.