Views from above

"I don't think that we were really anticipating [six months ago] the kind of serious economic downturn that has taken place," president and CEO Larry Lucchino said yesterday. "But once it began to hit in September, October, we began to plan for it and try to anticipate how it was going to affect the business side, how it was going to affect the baseball market, salaries and all of that. It has affected us, to be sure. We deal with it every day."

Though the Yankees seem to be immune after an offseason in which they "spent like the US Congress," as Lucchino quipped, the rest of baseball has been contemplating cutbacks, mostly in player salaries. Players like Bobby Abreu, Manny Ramírez, and Jason Varitek have been affected financially from a pullback in long-term, big-money deals.

It was a great time to get a one-year contract. But not much else.

Still, before the Sox reduced contracts to Brad Penny- and John Smoltz- and Rocco Baldelli-sized deals, limited in both money and length, they attempted to negotiate one that would have represented the biggest outlay of cash in the eight-year tenure of the current ownership - to Teixeira.

So how does that jibe with the economic forecast?

"I think it starts from one essential fact: that there is a commitment to winning," Lucchino said. "It is the foundation on which John [Henry], Tom [Werner], and our entire ownership group has built this franchise. That commitment to winning occasionally requires that you reach into the free agent market and try to acquire the best available pitching talent or position player talent in that year's market. We thought that if we could still justify that in light of the expectations we had for the revenue of the franchise, [we] saw it as an important effort at least to improve this team for our fan base."

Teixeira ultimately signed with the Yankees, who spent nearly $425 million on three players. Such extravagant spending, mostly curtailed outside the Bronx, is one reason the Sox owners came out in support of a version of a salary cap yesterday.