When Boomer & Gio went off the air on Friday, there were still about three hours left for the Yankees to meet Aaron Judge’s first pitch on Opening Day deadline to negotiate a contract extension – and unfortunately, those three hours did not net a long-term deal for the slugger.
So, Monday morning was their first chance to react to the situation – and they’re on team Cashman?
“We were hoping the Yankees and Aaron Judge would come to an agreement, and if they didn’t reach an agreement with one of their own, how bad would it look?” Gio asked. “Well, it didn’t look bad from a Yankees perspective because Brian Cashman came out and said what the terms of the deal were and why it was a fair offer!”
Gio doesn’t blame the GM, because “the talk around the Yankees was about them being cheap,” so Cashman had to change the narrative – and with the rumors swirling that Judge wanted more years as opposed to the money, Boomer was perplexed.
“I’ll tell you man, $230.5 million over eight years is a ton of dough to turn down, especially when you’re 30 years old,” Boomer said. “That’s the crux of all of this, and I do believe he would’ve wanted an eight-year extension. He’s either making $17 million or $21 million because of arbitration, and he has missed 156 games since 2017. When you take a look at this contract, you as a fan out there can take it for what it’s worth. If he was 27, this may have been a completely different negotiation.”
As Boomer noted, many MLB teams are trying to stay away from “long-term albatross-type contracts,” and then took Judge to task by invoking the memory of one past slugger who bet on himself and lost.
“Juan Gonzalez was 30 years old when he got offered eight years and $140 million by the Tigers in 2000 after having two MVPs, and he basically turned it down,” Boomer said. “He signed a smaller one-year contract and three years later he was gone. He had all that money out in front of him, which was a lot of money at the time, and he made a decision and it didn’t work out. That’s what Aaron Judge has to look at. I think this was a fair offer by the Yankees.”
“The reaction I saw a lot of was that they couldn’t believe he turned it down,” Gio added. “It wasn’t like the Yankees gave him a crap offer – it was more that at his age and injury history, they couldn’t believe he turned it down.”
The boys then discussed the rumors of Carlos Correa and Juan Soto also turning down massive contracts, as well how Judge felt about Cashman revealing the details – and foreshadowing a breakup?
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“It feels right now like a relationship that is on the way out,” Gio said bluntly. “Anything is possible, and you presented a scenario where maybe he has second thoughts, but what’s going to happen if he gets hurt or something, after he explained why he didn’t want to negotiate during the season? Is he going to crawl back to the Yankees?”
To that end, though, Boomer had a different thought:
“He has a responsibility to the rest of the players in the league to get as much money as he possibly can,” Booms said, “but the thing is that right now, he only has one group to negotiate against, and that’s the Yankees. If he has a great year, then he has every team in Major League Baseball.”
Follow WFAN's morning team on Twitter: @7BOOMERESIASON, @GioWFAN, @Alsboringtweets, @JerryRecco, and @WFANMornings
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