Thursday, December 6, 2012
NESN: Report: Brian Cashman Lacked Authority to Make Free-Agent Offers at Winter Meetings
The winter meetings — and the baseball offseason in general — has normally been a place where the Yankees have reigned supreme. If there was a free agent they wanted or needed, they got that free agent, money be damned.
The times, though, they are a changing.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Yankees general manager Brian Cashman went to the winter meetings in Nashville this week lacking the authority to make any sort of deals to free agents. New York reportedly offered Kevin Youkilis a one-year deal eventually, but that was only after Cashman was able to gain approval from Yankees ownership.
Agent Scott Boras hinted earlier in the week that Cashman was being held back. “He had indicated that right now, he’s working with ownership on getting advance authority,” Boras said, according to the Journal. “He really is not involved in a lot of dealing right now, but is doing due diligence to go back and meet with them about that.”
Why would a GM need authority to make free agent offers anyway?
A lot of people are getting mad at Cashman, but if you are going to get mad you probably need to shift your attention to the guys who tell him what to do. Hal Steinbrenner has every right to operate his team the way he wants, and fans have the right to not support the product if they don’t like it.
So who should our new team be? I need an hour or so to change the underlying assumptions and components in CAIRO to make them look better.
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