Chipper Opines About Yanks Spending

From Ken Bradley of the Sporting News (hat tip to River Ave. Blues):

It's never happened to me personally, but I think anybody who hits the free agent market is going to wait and see what the offer is from the Yankees. Because everybody knows that they're going to inflate the price. Whether they get you or not, they're going to hike the price up.

Scott Boras and some of these other high-profile agents, they'll use New York as a measuring stick. If New York is going to offer 5 percent or 10 percent or 20 percent more than anybody else, why not? They feel they have to offer a New York-style signing bonus on top of what a player is actually worth to the rest of the league just to get them to come play in New York.

Ten or 15 years ago, we could lure people to Atlanta strictly on reputation. You knew we were going to win, and we had a bunch of good players. Players would shun money from New York and take less to come here. For the past three seasons, we've kind of been on the downslide and not making the playoffs, so you can't do that anymore. We can't compete monetarily, so the only way we're going to get players in here to play and win is to force them--and that's done by trading.

The downside to trading is that it weakens your minor league system. But the only way that we are going to win now is through trades. We just don't have enough money to compete with the New York, Los Angeles and Chicago teams.

He seems to understand the system a lot better than the idiotic owners crying for a salary cap. And he's right; if you win, players will want to come and play for you, if you don't they're going to go somewhere else. It's not like everyone wanted to play for the Yankees in the late 80's-early 90's, but as soon as they started winning players wanted to come here and compete for a championship.

Chipper also had this gem about the loud mouths Phillies and the losers Mets:

We won for 14 consecutive years, and you never, ever saw any bulletin board material. And now that these two teams are on top of the division, they can't keep their mouths shut. Just go play baseball. It's Cole Hamels now. It was Jimmy Rollins and Carlos Beltran the past couple of springs. These two teams are constantly going at each other verbally. You know, win with class, lose with class. Just keep your mouth shut and go play your game.

Well said Chipper, well said.