If the Yankees sign Masahiro Tanaka — as they badly want to do — then they would all but eliminate any chance of getting under the $189 million luxury threshold. At least to begin the season.
But keep in mind, it is where you finish, not where you start. So, in theory, the Yanks can use the opening months of the 2014 season to see if they are contenders and, if not, attempt a massive summer sell-off to attempt to revive their farm system and go under the threshold by season’s end.
Two huge items complicate even trying this:
1. It still cannot happen without Alex Rodriguez’s suspension being for at least 150 games, if not all of 2014.
2. Is it in the Yankees’ DNA to ever surrender on a season?
After all, the case could be made the Yanks’ best chance to upgrade their prospect base while dropping under the threshold was last season.
By late spring training, they knew A-Rod had significant hip surgery, CC Sabathia had an elbow cleanup, Derek Jeter had a setback from ankle surgery, and Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira were going to miss significant portions of the season. It was arguably the moment to consider an aggressive marketing of their free-agents-to-be — Robinson Cano, Hiroki Kuroda, Granderson (upon his return to health), Phil Hughes, Boone Logan and Joba Chamberlain — with an eye on dropping under the 2013 $178 million threshold while repopulating their dormant system.
This would not have been a traditional rebuild since the Yanks could attack the free-agent market this offseason with ferocity, in fact more ferocity because they would have reset their tax clock from 50 percent to 17.5 percent. Plus, the improved prospect base could have made them viable in trades for players such as David Price and Matt Kemp.
Instead, the Yanks responded, for example, by adding $11.5 million last year for Vernon Wells. On one hand, good for the Steinbrenner family for always going for it. On the other, bad for the Steinbrenner family for not recognizing sometimes you have to punt for better field position.
How the trade for Wells was structured with the Angels, whereby the Yanks would pay a lot in 2013, but Wells would literally cost nothing toward the tax in 2014, was just one example of how much they planned to go under the $189 million threshold this year.
But missing the playoffs in 2013 seems to have triggered that never-surrender DNA in the organization again. Combine that with rising prices for top players and the Yanks’ zeal to compensate for the free-agent loss of Cano, and suddenly they are roughly at $209 million for luxury-tax purposes in 2014, when you combine those already signed, likely arbitration results, budget for in-season call-ups and the approximately $11 million each club is charged for benefits.
That is before, say, the $18 million or more it would take to land Tanaka and, say, another several million for a late-game reliever and perhaps a righty-swinging third baseman to replace A-Rod. That would put the Yanks in the $230 million-$235 million range.
The math is difficult to get from there to under $189 million even if, say, they are 10 games out of the wild card in July and want to hit the threshold.
The route to even trying begins with the $27.5 million A-Rod counts toward the tax vanishing, plus finding some club to take $2.5 million or so of the $6.5 million owed Ichiro Suzuki. That gets the Yanks down to $205 million-ish to begin the season.
Now it gets trickier to find the final $15 million. Once the season begins players are paid; so, for example, if the Yanks persuade Kuroda to accept a trade midway through the season (no sure thing, since he once turned down that chance when he was a Dodger), the Yanks would save about $8 million of his $16 million salary. Someone might want Alfonso Soriano (who also has a no-trade clause), but for tax purposes he costs the Yanks just $4 million, so perhaps they save $2 million with a mid-year deal. The same half-salary theory goes for walk-year players such as Brett Gardner and David Robertson, who each will make about $5 million in 2014.
Thus, if the Yanks make the commitment to go for it with Tanaka, their chances to ever get under the $189 million in 2014 moves from dubious to something that borderlines on impossible.