Alphabet soup is a dangerous game

"I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings: I preformed the rites, simple and decisive."

Seems like a good line for a pitcher to rehearse before taking the mound. Even better, they could intimidate them with three initials and this challenge from W.E.B. DuBois: "Liberty trains for liberty. Responsibility is the first step in responsibility." Alternatively, they could shrink it down to one initial and go with O. Henry's iconic, "It couldn't have happened anywhere but little old New York."

Indeed, little old New York was the only place where a pitcher with Burnett's history of injury and inconsistency would have netted a guaranteed five-year contract. Burnett, who will turn 32 in January, has put up a strong 3.78 ERA over the last five seasons, but he's only made it to 30 starts in two of them. In his most recent season, his ERA was above average but unimpressive at 4.07, a figure which breaks down to a 4.96 ERA in the first half of the season and 2.86 in the second half. Thus, the Yankees have agreed to pony up $82.5 million based in large part on the last 94.1 innings of Burnett's career.

Comparisons to Carl Pavano are inevitable and to some degree appropriate. The Yankees are taking a huge risk in signing a pitcher who has, in a major league career going back to 1999, pitched 200 innings just three times. He most recently surpassed the 200-inning mark in this season, when he pitched 221.1 innings, easily his career high.  He threw over 3,600 pitches, or about 400 more than he had thrown in any other season. The Blue Jays rolled up the pitcher's odometer; the Yankees will pay for what's left in the tank. The chances that Burnett will complete even the majority of this five-year deal in good working order seems remote. If you were cynical, you might suspect that signing Burnett was Brian Cashman's backdoor method of working Phil Hughes back into the rotation while simultaneously pleasing his ownership with another big-dollar signing, because someone will inevitably be picking up missed starts from Burnett and it might as well be Hughes or Ian Kennedy.

That said, the comparisons to Carl Pavano are overblown in two ways: first, no pitcher should have his work ethic impugned with a comparison to Pavano until proven guilty. Second, Pavano had no upside. None. Zero. If Pavano had been healthy for the last three years, the Yankees would have gotten, at best, very average, journeyman work. That's at best--Pavano had had just one season in his career in which he had been both healthy and good, and that season, the one that suckered the Yankees in, was 2005, when Pavano had been very lucky on balls in play, with batters hitting only .285 when they made contact. We know, have known since somewhere around the turn of the century, that for most pitchers, when they allow a .285 average on balls in play in a league that hit .300 when making contact, that's not good pitching, that's good luck, and luck nearly always reverts. The Yankees never, never, never should have treated Pavano as more than a fifth starter worthy of fifth starter's wages.

Burnett is different. Burnett has real stuff and can be dominant. It's not just about who is standing behind him, but how many batters he can send back to the dugout with their bats still in their hands. That doesn't mean that Burnett isn't a risk, but that unlike Pavano he may reward the gamble.

In all, though, the Burnett deal seems like a reach at an annual value of $16.5 million, especially since the Yankees have claimed that they cannot afford to pursue Mark Teixeira, the desperately needed star first baseman. Twenty-nine in April, Teixeira will be a viable, productive player for at least the duration of the Burnett contract if not longer, with a much smaller chance of extended time on the disabled list. In a time of limited resources for even the Yankees, they should have parked their money where they had the greatest certainty of it doing them some good. Buying A.J. seems about as safe a bet as buying GM.