Former Yankee Gary Sheffield, now an agent, says that Robinson Cano will regret going to Seattle for the extra money.
“When you leave New York, you’re gonna feel it,” Sheffield said on MLB Network. “Just ask guys like Johnny Damon and all these guys that had names and went somewhere else, you didn’t hear anything about them.”
The Mariners signed Robinson Cano to a ten-year, $240 million contract. The Yankees’ maximum offer was for seven years and $175 million. Cano will now be tasked with reviving an offense that has floundered in recent years. The Mariners haven’t hit .240 as a team since 2009, and haven’t scored 700 runs since 2007.
“I think that Cano is a good enough player that you’ll hear about him, but being in a lineup like that — he hasn’t tasted that kind of food yet,” Sheffield said.” You’ve gotta be the first batter and the second batter all the way through the ninth batter and when you have to go up there every day and face that, you start to realize that money ain’t everything.”
Sheffield intimated that if he were in Cano’s shoes, he would have done whatever it took to stay in New York.
“I talked to Robbie and I said, ‘You couldn’t bridge the gap?’ You could have at least gotten them up to $200 [million] and then try to make [the rest] off the field,” he said.
“When you talk about the Yankees making an offer, it is what it is. The bottom line is, this is a negotiation, and when you start negotiating, you can get creative and do all kinds of things to make it work. The Yankees would have loved to defer money, especially with A-Rod’s contract and bringing [Derek] Jeter back for his final year, they could have [gotten] creative with the contract to stay under [the $189 million threshold]. He could have just said, ‘Let’s defer a certain amount of money so you can stay under that number, but still give me mine.’ That’s something that could have happened.”
Sheffield also disagreed with Cano’s assessment that the Yankees “disrespected” him by only offering the seven-year, $175 million contract, saying that personal feelings can’t get in the way of a contract negotiation, which is business-driven.
“That’s what made me different, is that I never took anything [personally] towards contracts,” he said. “Regardless if they pay you what you want or not, they’re really making their offer based on what they think is right. A lot of times, we take that stuff [personally] because we look at it as, ‘You never played. You don’t understand that I’m the best at what I do.’ All of those things go in your head, and you can’t rationalize that people are just making business decisions.”