Supporting the Yankees

I was recently forwarded an email which contained, as an attachment, a scanned copy of an NFL contract from 1944.  The contract, between the Green Bay Packers and a player named Ed McGroaraty, agreed to pay the athlete $150 per game, plus $35 per week for travel expenses, with the possibility of increasing payment "as soon as you are playing the kind of ball deserving more money."  The timing of this email was perfect; when I received it, I was on ESPN.com reading about Derek Jeter's contract dispute with the New York Yankees.

McGroaraty's 1944 contract with the Green Bay Packers.

As one Caught Looking reader accurately noted on Facebook yesterday, Jeter's stats clearly don't justify the kind of pay increase he's asking for.  It's hard not to agree with the following:

It's really fairly difficult to make the Yankees look like the reasonable party in a negotiation but Derek Jeter is apparently giving it his all. Players with a higher WAR* last year than Jeter's (2.5) last year: Omar Infante (2.7), Mike Napoli (2.7), Kevin Kouzmanoff (2.9), Luke Scott (3.1), and about 80 others.

But, as usual, I'm not here to debate Jeter's statistics or monetary value.  What I can't stop thinking about, though, is the notion that, according to a supposedly credible source, "the Jeter side [doesn't want] Jeter's value to be judged against that of other shortstops, preferring to base his worth on his legacy as an all-time great Yankee."

I realize that it's within every professional athlete's right to fight for the best contract he can.  MLB stars like Jeter generate a ton of revenue for their teams, and Jeter is certainly allowed to negotiate as large a contract as possible.  The question here, though, is if there's a difference between what Jeter is "allowed" to do as a star baseball player and what he "should" do as part of his self-professed efforts to be remembered as an "all-time great Yankee."  For years now, Jeter has been the gold standard of baseball players, from his cordial relationship with the media to his lack of (speculated) performance enhancing drug use.  If there was one MLB star who I would have thought would have quietly and smoothly agreed to a reasonable deal to return to his team, it would have been Derek Jeter.  These surprising developments in the Jeter vs. the Yankees contract saga show that I was wrong.

Derek Jeter is not Ed McGroaraty, and this is not 1944.  Jeter plays in a professional sports landscape full of multi-million dollar player contracts, television agreements and stadium construction proposals, and has the right to carve out the biggest piece of that pie that he can.  At the same time, though, the Yankees have the right to play hardball and stick to their original (and seemingly more than fair) three year, $45 million offer.  I hope that for once the Yankees stay true to their word about refusing to overspend, and until they budge from their current position they have my support (for once) in their battle against Derek Jeter. 

*WAR = Wins Above Replacement