Hopper15 wrote:For some reason, there's this fallacious belief that Cohan isn't cheap. A few years ago, I posted our payroll rank over the Cohan era and we've consistenly been in the 20's. It's a joke.
I don't think it is quite that simple, though. If anything, we've overpaid for our own free agents when we had the opportunity through most of his regime. And we've seldom had the opportunity to go spend money to make the team better, because we've been capped out. It is possible we could have been more creative and found ways to spend money; I just think we don't have enough data to say if he'll spend money when it is warranted. I find it hard to reflect back on places where we've refused to spend money when we should have, and it is easy to find examples where we spent money poorly. People talking off the cuff will bring up Arenas as an example where we were "too cheap", but in fact that is almost the opposite: we had overpaid enough other players that it was challenging to figure out how we could pay Arenas. And honestly I loved Gilbert and still thought Washington overpaid him at the time. In hindsight, they did just fine.
I'm not saying he isn't cheap. I just don't have much to point at to prove it. I am comfortable saying we've done a lousy job managing our payroll, though.
