You’re missing out on one of the all time threads. The original “is Roger Clemens a douche” thread.

Nothing happened. He and Roger just watched a movie together and drifted off to sleep. It was sweet.

I guess if you limit it to our young players you’re right – only I wasn’t limiting it to our guys. They’ll be dozens of FAs we’ll wanna sign in the coming years that we’ll be unable to sign because of the money being eaten up by Hafner’s contract – dozens.

Okay.

We will never prioritize anything over locking up our best young players. Not ever. Those deals are ultimately cost-saving anyway.

Hafner’s essentially money comes out of our “veteran budget,” free agents and guys extended beyond their initial free agency, which is about half the payroll but only covers a handful of players.

Iin 2008: Sabathia (10), Westbrook (11), Byrd (8), Dellucci (3.75), Michaels (2), Kobayashi (3.25), Borowski (4)—total of $42 million.

In 2009: Westbrook (11), Kobayashi (3.25), Dellucci (4), Hafner (11.5)—total of $29.75 million.

In 2010: Westbrook (11), Hafner (11.5)—total of $22.5 million.

In 2011: Hafner (13), Sizemore (7.5)—total of $20.5 million.

In 2012: Hafner (13)—total of $13 million.

There is basically a hierarchy of investment quality:

1. Pre-arbitration guys - any team can afford these.
2. Lockups - guys under multi-year deals, signed prior to arbitration and covering those seasons. Much better value than anything else.
3. Arbitration cases - they make more than lockups, but minimized risk on a one-year deal.
4. Hometown extensions - leveraging high-quality relationships with players who like playing for Cleveland, resulting in contracts that are favorable in terms of risk and/or cost, e.g., Sabathia, Westbrook and Hafner’s current deals.
5. Low-end free agents - minimized cost and risk, some upside.
6. High-end free agents - high risk, but far better ROI at the top of the scale than in the middle.
7. All other free agents—usually a bad value except in a special situation, team affinity or market under-values the player.

Now, 6 and 7 are so bad, we will hardly ever see them. We dabble in 5 to fill holes or add depth, lots of bullpen signings recently. But essentially, 5-6-7 are so hard to do effectively, that we look to do 4 whenever we can, or else risk not having any effective way to spend our budget at all.

I’m not saying the Indians separate things out in quite this way, but as most of our young players have now reached arbitration years (4-6) while we still have several who are younger than that (1-3), the Indians’ model will tend to keep the rest of the payroll stable. Under that assumption, and the assuming that this “veteran” part of the budget (4-7) will rise to about $60 million in 2012, the Hafner contract, while cumbersome, doesn’t kill us.

That is, (a) it only takes up 25% of that part of our budget, (b) it won’t touch the other half of our budget, which is fairly stable, and© the Indians will still have incentive to do #4 deals, which are generally more productive than 5-6-7. Therefore, spending will be affected most in the free agent signings, which are by far the least productive part of our roster, dollars-per-marginal-win.

It sucks, but we can handle it. I don’t know how many #4 deals we’ll really be wanting to do in those latter years, anyway. The main candidates will be Victor, Jhonny, Lee and Betancourt, and given the volatility of those players and those positions, we’ll be lucky if we really want to pay to keep more than one or two of those guys.