There is simply no downside to making Jeter a massive offer. In the worst-case scenario he calls your bluff and you get the Yankees captain. I don’t care if Jeter is way past his prime or if the Sox would have to wildly overpay a player of his diminished skills.
I say offer him the world. Forget about Jayson Werth. Blow Jeter away with dollars and years. At worst this would just mean the Sox would jack up the final price the Yankees must pay. It could be sort of like Mark Teixeira-in-reverse. And if Jeter actually signed with Boston, the damage to the Yankees’ psyche would be inestimable.
Shaughnessy says the Sox should offer Jeter three years at $20 million per. And I think he’s quite serious. $60 million to “damage the Yankees’ psyche.” No discussion whatsoever of what having Derek Jeter as the starting shortstop at that salary would mean to, you know, the competitive position of the Red Sox for the next three years. No apparent understanding that, unlike Shaughnessy himself, the people who run the Red Sox these days don’t think of the world as an epic Yankees-Red Sox battle in which sense and reason is discarded. No actual baseball analysis at all. It’s pure red meat for the “screw the Yankees” crowd.
Which is fine on some level because I know this is sports, and sports shouldn’t always be sober and serious. But this is the sort of thing that you have to keep in mind when Shaughnessy and others who peddle this stuff turn around and demand that they themselves be taken seriously.