Cliff Lee says one reason he chose to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies rather than the New York Yankees this past offseason is that the Yankees are old. The Yankees say they are not, at least not everywhere.
Fact is, Lee is wrong about that — at least when you compare average roster ages. According to ESPN, the Phillies are actually the oldest team in baseball with an average age of 29.9 years, while the Yankees are 11th with an average age of 28.1.
OK, so now that we have established that Cliff Lee is bad at math — or that he was spewing random nonsense in response to a question he has heard too many times — the why didn’t you sign with the Yankees question — I have to ask. Why do we keep circling back to the ‘why didn’t you sign with the Yankees’ question when talking about Lee? Can we all get over it already, please?
The guy didn’t want to, plain and simple. He left money on the table to play with the Phillies because that is what he wanted to do.
Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman seems to have been able to let the whole Lee saga go.
“It was a marriage that was not meant to be. That’s life,” said Cashman.
I wish everybody else could just move on the way Cashman has.