Boston Red Sox left-hander Jon Lester, who overcame cancer to become one of the best pitchers in the American League, has agreed to a five-year, $30 million contract extension with a $13 million team option in 2014, a source close to the team told Yahoo! Sports.So now the Sox have locked up Dustin Pedroia, Kevin Youkilis, and now Jon Lester all to long
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The deal is contingent on Lester passing a physical Tuesday. The impending deal is the largest given to a pitcher with around two years of service time, doubling the four-year, $15 million deal Cleveland’s Fausto Carmona signed at the beginning of last season. If the Red Sox exercise the option, they will have kept Lester off the free-agent market for two years.
term deals. As much as I hate to say it, that's a nice core group to lock up. All very smart moves by those bums in Boston.
4 Comments:
they wont be going away anytime soon. All 3 are top players at their positions.. and all are signed to reasonable contracts. i hate to say it but they are the model franchise in baseball right now.
This just proves how bad of a gm Brian Cashman is. Cano is making more money a year than Pedroia who just won an mvp. Cashman should of locked up Wang for a similar type deal. He could of signed Posada and Rivera to a cheaper deal if he signed them the spring training before there free agency. But he let them test free agency and wound up paying more.
Anon: It's not Cashman's fault, it's the way the ownership likes to do things. Secondly, you knock them for signing Cano long term, but not doing the same thing for Wang. Well which is, do you want them to sign their guys young long term or not?
How on earth anyone could have known that Pedroia would have a better 2008 than Cano is beyond me. Cano had shown significantly better power, if a bit less patience. How anyone could have expected a tiny, swing-out-of-your-shoes guy like Pedroia to put up an .869 OPS is beyond me, but he's no MVP, not with numbers like those. There were 17 players in the AL with a better OPS.
He may be fiesty, he may be a good hitter, but he's not an MVP. Even Youkilis was way more valuable to that team than Pedroia. Youkilis had a better OBP, better Slugging, better OPS (by almost 100 points), 12 more HRs... he was their MVP. Pedroia batted .326, 17 HR, 83 RBI, and a .376 OBP. Excellent numbers for a little guy, but just not that spectacular.
Anyway, Cano may still prove to be the better player long term, we just don't know yet.
You also knock the Yankees for not signing Rivera and Posada earlier, but the Red Sox don't do that either. There's no way they'd lock up their older players long term, especially not before they are free agents. They didn't do it with Pedro, Schilling, Varitek, and others, so when you give them credit for locking up Lester, Pedroia, and Youkilis you're comparing apples to oranges.
Finally, it remains to be seen how the contracts work out. Cano, again, has had one bad year. We'll see how he bounces back. Pedroia has had one good season. We'll see what HE does following that up.
Let's face it. The Red Sox have made some excellent decisions in the past 5 years, but to suggest they've done some markedly better work than the Yankees is silly. The Yankees handed them the trophy in 2004 by blowing a 3-0 lead, and if not for all the injuries in 2008 the Yankees may very well have taken the WC from the Sox. Everyone acts as though the Red Sox have been head and shoulders above the Yankees over the past 5 or so years, but the truth is that they've been very equal in terms of team quality. The Yankees have even won more games than the Sox over that period, the problem has been bad luck in the playoffs more than anything else. Everyone wants to blame it on not having some sort of mythological "grit" that the late 90s teams had, but honestly, I think it's luck.
But anyway, I digress. The point is that the Red Sox really don't operate that much differently from the Yankees. Just because a few of the moves they've made worked out while a few of the moves the Yankees have made didn't fare as well doesn't mean that the Red Sox are somehow geniuses while the Yankees are stupid.
For the record, I think signing Cano was the wise move, and signing Wang would be equally smart. Just throwin' that out there.
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