Irrational decision would be plenty rational

WITH the Yankees entertaining Patrick Corbin in The Bronx on Thursday, the third and apparently final stop of Corbin’s Acela tour, it’s a great time to invoke the financial wisdom of Friedman. Not Milton Friedman, the late, lauded economist who once enjoyed a breakfast meeting with Yogi Berra — Yogi praised him for being far more coherent than Casey Stengel — but rather Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations who has guided his club to two straight National League pennants. “If you’re always rational about every free agent,” Friedman told the Los Angeles Times’ Andy McCullough in December 2016, “you will finish third on every free agent.” The Yankees have arrived at this juncture, a robust nucleus and pay- roll flexibility, by virtue of a healthy rational-to-irrational ratio covering their recent baseball operations. However, the time has come to behave irrationally, if necessary. And Corbin stands as the unlikely recipient of such risky generosity.

If Corbin won’t join his childhood favorite team for a contract of fewer than six years, then the Yankees should suck it up and give the man his six years (and presumably $130ish million).

Maybe they can get it done with five years and $110-ish million, or five years and a vesting option for 2024. As The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal pointed out, the Nationals, who hosted the upstate New York native Corbin on the second stop of his East Coast suitors, are notorious for deferring the payments in their long-term deals, and the Phillies’ three-year, $75 million agreement with Jake Arrieta earlier this year reflects Philadelphia’s preference for shorter deals with pitchers.

Or perhaps the Nats, whose lack of starting pitching depth allowed the Braves to leap over them, figure they might as well be more aggressive with Corbin as they move on from the Bryce Harper era. And could Phillies managing partner John Middleton kick off his era of “stupid” spending, as he recently put it to USA Today, by securing Corbin as a further lure to Harper or Manny Machado?

The Yankees can’t afford to be pragmatic anymore. With Dellin Betances, Didi Gregorius and Aaron Hicks approaching their walk years in 2019, their youth movement already has hit puberty. And in order to thwart the Red Sox and Astros, the last two champions who both eliminated the Yankees en route to their parades, they need as much top-flight starting pitching as they can acquire.

They executed a tremendous opening salvo in trading for James

Paxton, who both possesses a higher ceiling than J.A. Happ (the free agent the Yankees had interest in re-signing) and very likely will earn less money than Happ. That favorable exchange rate should turn the Yankees even more confident as they turn toward Corbin, who would team with Paxton, Luis Severino, Masahiro Tanaka and CC Sabathia to give the Yankees a mighty front five.

Of course Corbin would come with questions. He already has undergone one Tommy John surgery and relies heavily on a wipeout slider. He pitched in the underwhelming National League West, which offered patsies like the Giants and the Padres (although the 2019 Orioles figure to be pretty awful in their own right).

Yet he represents the best available option, by far, at a moment the Yankees must aim that high, after punting on other such recent opportunities. They passed on Chris Sale two years ago because they didn’t think they were ready yet for such a finishing piece, and Sale now owns a ring with the Red Sox. They let Justin Verlander go to the Astros in August 2017 out of deference to their plan to get under the luxury-tax threshold in 2018 — even though Giancarlo Stanton, at a similar luxury-tax number, wound up on the team in ’18 — and Verlander has his ring. And they saw the Astros trade for Gerrit Cole earlier this year because they wouldn’t swap Miguel Andujar to the Pirates.

The Sale and Cole calls are forgivable (the White Sox wanted Luis Severino and another big piece back for Sale), the Verlander one less so. Letting Corbin get away due to stubborn rationality would go alongside the Verlander call.

The Yankees have finished second in their division the past two years and four of the past five, mixing in a fourth-place occupancy in 2016. If they want to finally get back to the penthouse, they can’t finish second — or, heaven forbid, third — on Corbin. Just this once, irrationality should reign.