One of the the things that one typically reads on baseball message boards in November and early December is an exchange like this:
Person One: Why isn't anything happening with my team yet?
Person Two: This is how it is in baseball, nothing happens until the winter meetings, then things get cooking.
Sure, this year's winter meetings saw a few "big names" come off the board, most notably former Brewer CC Sabathia taking the offer he couldn't refuse from the Yankees. But now we're back to a holding pattern again, where little is going on with the market. The cause of this inaction is pretty clearly that the asking prices for a lot of players have not fallen yet to a level where teams are eager to pay, unless that team happens to be in the Bronx:
Throughout baseball, budgets are being downsized from week to week to reflect the latest read on the economy, and what you are about to see -- once the smoke clears from the Sabathia and Burnett and Teixeira news conferences -- is a stunning drop in salaries for the free agents, a time when solid veteran players might be fortunate to get one-year offers for $5 million to $8 million. General managers throughout the game are reporting, on background, that their payrolls are being locked down, cut down, slashed.
If Mr. Olney's prognostication is correct (and he's not the only one thinking along these lines) then this is a good time to be willing to spend on short term, veteran players. Incidentally, that is exactly where the Milwaukee Brewers needs stand. As guys like Randy Johnson, Braden Looper, Brain Fuentes and even Adam Dunn or Orlando Hudson come to grips with the New Year reality that the monster deal they thought they had coming to them just isn't there, Melvin can and should be standing there with Mark Attanasio's wallet open.
This is, of course, assuming two things:
- That these players driven to accept less than they thought they could get will be willing to accept that lesser amount from Milwaukee over some other teams, likely in more classically desirable locales.
- That the Brewers are looking at less of a financial crunch than your average big league team and aren't in the same sort of fiscal hell that others find themselves in.
If number two proves to be at least mostly not true (and common sense tells you that they have some wiggle room coming off of the season they had in 2008 and knowing that they could have found a way to pay CC Sabathia had he accepted) and they are able to overcome number one in a few cases, this could be a very productive off-season for the Brewers....if they're willing to wait.