The Art Neuro Weblog

He Said, She Said
The Ugly Business of having traded Nomar Garciaparra has turned even uglier. Essentially, principal owner John W. Henry is claiming that they had no choice but to trade Nomar Garciaparra after it was disclosed that he might miss significant time between now and the end of September.

"I wanted to sit down with him and remind him of the chronology of events that had occurred, just to make sure he understood why we went the A-Rod route."

That one-on-one meeting never took place. Instead, Henry said, there was the July 24 meeting at Fenway Park while the Sox and Yankees were waiting for rain to let up so they could start their game. The purpose of that meeting was twofold, Henry said. One was to ask Garciaparra what he thought could be done to help the Sox and to help him. The other, Henry said, was to ask Garciaparra why he seemed so unhappy.

Said Henry, "The next day, after that meeting -- I don't know if I'm breaking a confidence, my general manager will probably be mad at me -- I got a phone call from Theo, who said that he had talked to Arn, who said that prior to that meeting he had to talk Nomar out of demanding a trade. We knew from that that he didn't want to be here."

So was there a fissure? "Obviously there was," Henry said. "That was why I wanted to remind him of the Dec. 5 call between Arn and Theo when negotiations broke down between Theo and Arn. That's the point at which the A-Rod stuff took off."

Arn Tellem, the agent of Nomar Garciaparra has countered saying that The Red Sox simply never put on a serious negotiation and traded the problem away rather than deal with it; and also that the Red Sox should just 'let it go'.

But Tellem disputed Henry's version of what took place when the club resumed contract negotiations with Garciaparra last March, a year after the Sox had offered Garciaparra a four-year, $60 million deal for an average value of $15 million a year. Garciaparra had counteroffered with a four-year proposal that averaged $17 million a year in March of 2003, and the sides agreed to table discussions until after the season. That's when the Sox began discussions with the Texas Rangers about A-Rod, and the Sox made a lesser offer to Garciaparra, a four-year, $48 million deal, both developments leading to an acrimonious exchange in which Tellem called the Sox "disingenuous" and Henry branded Tellem a "hypocrite."

Just before Epstein flew to New York to meet with Rodriguez, he called Garciaparra and told him he would call off the A-Rod talks if Garciaparra took the lesser offer. Garciaparra refused, the A-Rod deal fell apart, and the sides met again in spring training, a meeting, Tellem claims, which began with Henry apologizing for his remarks about Tellem. Henry said last night that the Sox wound up offering Garciaparra $60 million -- the same figure they'd offered the year before -- but admitted much of the money was deferred. He also said Tellem never made a counterproposal to any of the Sox offers since the 2003 season ended.

Not true, Tellem said. "I was the one who suggested that we use deferred money to break the logjam," he said. "Larry Lucchino said that was a good idea. They came back with a proposal that, based on the way the players' association calculates contracts, was close to $12 million (in average annual value), and by the owners' calculation closer to, but less than, $12.5 million. It contained a significant amount of deferred money that wouldn't be paid to Nomar until he was 60 or 70. I told them respectfully that I would be in my 80s by then and given my health history, I wasn't sure I'd be around to make sure the contract was enforced."

And contradicting Henry, Tellem said he offered a counterproposal, one in which the deferred monies would be paid at the end of the contract, or when Garciaparra retired, which would have made the average annual value around $14.5 million, less than the $15 million a year the Sox had offered the year before. The Sox rejected that proposal, Tellem said, but he came away from the talks feeling positive, he said, that something might be done.

Instead, the Sox, claiming they had no chance of re-signing Garciaparra after the season, and fearing that his injury would leave him unavailable for much of the last two months, made last Saturday's trade.

How did it get so bad? The Red Sox offered Nomar a deal he turned down. So the Red Sox decided to trade for Alex Rodriguez on the assumption that Nomar wouldn't stay, and that A-Rod was a better shortstop. The negotiations for A-Rod of course went for weeks and ultimately failed, which hurt Nomar's pride, but also meant that the Red Sox had to go back to dealing with their golden child who they had essentially insulted. To add insult to injury, The Yankees acquired A-Rod (even though they already had Derek Jeter at shortstop) to play third base. In other words, if the Red Sox were truly creative, they might have conceived of moving A-Rod to play third next to Nomar and signed Nomar, come hell or high water. Heaven only knows that A-Rod was so desperate to get out of Texas.

So in essence, the Red Sox went from having a super-shortstop to not having one, while the Yankees had one and got another, the best super-shortstop of them all, to play third base. The joke doing the rounds is that when Nomar becomes a Free Agent at the end of the year, the Yankees will sign him to play second base where they have a hole. And Nomar would sign just to spite Red Sox management. Well, that's about as likely as say, Ricky Ponting signing with the Yankees, but you never say never.

- Art Neuro