Writers, teams not quite ready to welcome successful MLB welfare state

• MLB's revenue sharing and luxury tax bills vs the Yankees are enormous and intended to stop them from overspending. The system is working. Attention should now focus on what teams are doing with the Yankees' money and the profit sharing they all received from MLB.com. Baseball media define the discourse differently. Joel Sherman sums up the past week:

(Joel Sherman): "But in a "greed is bad" moment, the Twins wanted more, namely Ian Kennedy. They speculated the Yanks would never really leave the bidding. However, Andy Pettitte shunned retirement and

• the Yanks pulled their offer. They never made another one. On

• Monday, Minnesota called to say Hughes could be removed from the offer if Kennedy and Chien-Ming Wang were the replacements. The Yanks hated that idea, too.

So in an attempt to move the B-plus offers of the Yanks and Red Sox to A-plus, the Twins ended up with a C-minus package from the Mets, the last team standing. This had happened once before. After the 2004 season, the Yanks decided they had the money for either Randy Johnson or Carlos Beltran, and opted for Johnson. Beltran's agent, Scott Boras, then - like Minnesota now - always believed the Yanks would eventually get back into talks. They didn't.

• At the last moment, Boras even offered a gigantic discount to the Yanks New York Yankees ,who still refused. With no place else to exceed $100 million, Beltran fell into the Mets New York Mets lap.

Good for the Mets. Persistence and fortune matter in life and baseball.

• Johnson, though, was a Yankee mistake. Beltran would have been a better choice. Johnson proved to be part of another class of failed veteran starters imported that offseason - along with Carl Pavano Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright -

that finally convinced Cashman the Yanks had to stop chasing this ilk and fully invest, instead, in high-end young pitching.

• Cashman won a power struggle that offseason and gained a three-year extension based on a plan to protect touted arms already in the organization, such as Hughes, and find more in the draft and internationally such as Kennedy and Joba Chamberlain."

From NY Post column by Joel Sherman, "Phil's Pitching for a Job-Cashman's," 1/31/08

• P.S. It's not just about Phil Hughes. It's about too much money. (sm)

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