Yanks Should Make Friends With Incentives

As Adam Dunn continues to stick out like a built for YS sore thumb, the Yanks really need to consider trying to work out an incentive laden deal with him. In fact, they should do as many of these as they can going forward. Previously, it was always said that the Yanks didn't like putting incentives in deals. But generally, that was at a time when the incentives were largely awards and all-star based and were sought on top of huge guaranteed money. Now the Yanks have a chance to get someone like Dunn at a lower guaranteed number, but can build in rate incentives. In other words, he rewarded for the more he does. Their should be OPS bonuses starting at OPSing .850 and moving at increments of ten to over 1.000.



By rewarding rate stats rather than counting stats there would be strong incentives to produce power and patience, but no raw numbers of hits, walks or xbh's that had to be produced. The Yanks would just reward the rates, and the player would be responsible for producing the AB's to create them. Likewise, pitchers could be incentivised by their defense independant era rates. That would mean, there would be no incentive to necessarily overdue the K's, but strong incentives to pitch well.



Rate incentives can't really be screwed with the same way play time incentives can be. There'd be no reason for a manager to sit someone to keep them away from bonuses, and no reason for aplayer, like Andy Pettitte, to pitch hurt when it would also hurt his money.


Anyway, while the Yanks should be looking for bargains to shore up the O, rate based incentives would be a great way to reward performance and inspire good play.