A general manager recently had a conversation with the agent for a prominent player. "I told [the agent] that I was ready to make an offer," recalled the general manager, "but I didn't want to throw out something that the [player] would consider embarrassing. I didn't want to make an offer that the player would consider humiliating."
In the end, the GM did not make the offer, which would've been for less than $1 million. But it is evident that a lot of veteran players are coming to grips with the reality that there isn't a lot of cash available for the middle class of players this winter.
CC Sabathia,
Mark Teixeira,
A.J. Burnett and
Derek Lowe fared well, but the dropoff, after that, gets steeper by the day.
| Olney's news and notes |
• Young agrees to play 3B for Rangers
• Dukes facing possible jail time
• Twins taking a look at Gagne
• Garland rejects an offer from D-backs
• B.J. Upton might miss Opening Day
Around the majors with Buster Olney 
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In the past, there seems to have been an entry fee paid for veterans with a track record -- a little extra, for the experience, for the numbers on the back of the baseball card. But in this winter of relative austerity in baseball, you don't get extra credit for your history.
The latest example:
David Eckstein earned $4.5 million with the Blue Jays last season and has played in 1,000 games in the big leagues, and on Thursday,
he settled for a deal of $850,000 with the Padres -- or a little more than what
Dallas McPherson got to sign with the Marlins.
Ken Griffey Jr., one of the greatest players of his generation, remains a free agent, and John Fay speculates in this piece that he could get
$3 million or $4 million for a year. It would be a significant victory for his agent, I think, if he can get Griffey half that amount, in this long, cold winter.
Griffey and
Pedro Martinez and others are going to have to decide how much money makes it worth their while to play baseball in 2009. Martinez and Griffey presumably have tens of millions banked, and each will be elected into the Hall of Fame in the first year his name appears on the ballot; nothing they do going forward is going to change that, one way or the other.
If they play in 2009, it will be for the love of the game, and after years of running around ballfields, each of them might decide that time spent with the family is worth more than the money they could make trying to stick with a team in the big leagues. As Ken Rosenthal writes, this is what
Paul Byrd has decided to do, after weighing what he referred to as "really nice offers" against
the lure of staying home.
The
economy is a concern for baseball, says
Bud Selig.
Around the majors with Buster Olney
Buster Olney
