Posada re-signs, 4 years $52.4m

The Yankees had 2 critical needs this off-season.

Critical Need #1- Don't let Alex Rodriguez leave.
Critical Need #2- Don't let Jorge Posada leave.

We weren't able to keep Alex but we did keep Jorge. (Shown here with his smoking hot wife, Laura Posada.)

Any other move was nice but not fully necessary. If Pettitte retired, if Mo went to the Phillies (what a horrible thought), if they didn't bring over Kosuke Fukudome from Japan, if they didn't resurrect the cold, still bones of Lou Gehrig to play first base, it would be OK. It would not be OK if A-Rod left or if Jorge Posada left.

I'm not going to talk about heart, grit or intangibles here even though Posada's grit+ was off the charts, second only to Dustin Pedroia's in 2007. But the Beantown Napoleon is about 3 feet tall so there was no competition anyways. Anyways, when it comes to baseball my true colors show. I'm a positivist and a believer in material causality.

We don't put winning teams on the field by getting 25 good "clubhouse guys" who "know how to win" and "play the game the right way." I actually have nothing but contempt for those phrases. We win because at the end of the day we outscored the other team, whether our clubhouse was full of selfish, obnoxious Nazi's or saints and martyrs.

To understand why a commitment of 4 years and $52m to a player in his decline is still a great idea, it would be helpful to look at Bill James' spectrum of defensive difficulty and importance.

1B, RF, LF, 3B, CF/2B, SS, C

To break it down, the right-side is hard to play and hard to find players who excel at offense while the converse is true of the left-side. There are a lot of ways to look at this hierarchy. It's also how involved in the game each position is. The catcher has the most work to do and his work is the most difficult. First base has the least to do and his defense affects the team the least. Boston fans and Bill Buckner disagree, but then again they probably would, the whiny slime that they are.

Yahoo sports, incidentally, allows you to compare any player with the typical production of other players in the same league, which is about exactly what statistics like VORP and WARP3 do, but the pictures make it easier for most sports fans to understand.

The reason the Yankees were so good during their dynasty years was that they were unbelievably blessed with talent at those positions. Posada/Girardi at catcher, Jeter at shortstop and Bernie Williams manning center field during each of their peak years. It was not "clutch hitting," it was VORP.

And given the absolute lack of other options available at catcher, the Yankees had no leverage in this situation. Who else was available? Clubhouse cancer, Michael Barrett with his sparkling .322 career OBP? Posada's career average is about even with Barrett's career best. Everything after Barrett is atrocious.

So ultimately, this is a deal the Yankees had to make, all $52.4m of it. The $13.1m is a lot less than I was expecting (I was expecting 3 years at $15 or $16m in Average Annual Value) but I'm not complaining. He'll play first or DH in the final year of his contract and then walk into the Hall of Fame as a life-long Yankee and have his number hanging in Monument Park the following year.

This is good. Hip Hip Jorge!