Carl Pavano

Carl Pavano signed a four-year, $39.95 million contract with the New York Yankees in December 2004 as a proven 18-game winner coming off an All-Star season with the Florida Marlins. Over the next four years, he made 26 starts. That's it. That's the whole tenure -- 26 starts, one entire season lost, a fractured-rib story that turned into a full-blown clubhouse controversy, and a tabloid nickname that outlived his career. "American Idle" wasn't clever because it rhymed. It was clever because it was accurate.

Path to the Bronx

Pavano's road to New York ran through some odd detours. Boston drafted him in the 13th round in 1994, then shipped him -- along with Tony Armas Jr. -- to Montreal in November 1997 to land Pedro Martinez. Read that again: Pavano was part of the return package for a Hall of Famer before he'd thrown a single big-league pitch (Red Sox fans got the better end of that one, obviously, but it's a fun detail to file away).

He scuffled with the Expos for parts of five seasons, got traded to the Marlins in the middle of 2002, and finally figured it out in Florida. He won a ring with the 2003 World Series champs, then broke out in 2004 with a genuine ace's season -- 18-8, 3.00 ERA, 222.1 innings, an All-Star nod. That was the version of Pavano the Yankees paid for.

Brian Cashman needed rotation help after a brutal ALCS collapse in October 2004, and on December 20, 2004, the Yankees beat out reported bigger offers from Boston, Detroit, and Cincinnati to sign Pavano to four years and $39.95 million. His agent later said Joe Torre's personal outreach sealed it -- Pavano supposedly told him he'd "go to war" for the man. Given what actually happened, that quote hasn't aged well.

Yankees Career

The 2005 season actually started fine. Pavano threw quality starts in seven of his first ten outings and sat at 4-2 with a 3.69 ERA into early June (nobody was calling him a bust yet). Then a right shoulder injury hit, back trouble followed, and he finished the year 4-6 with a 4.77 ERA over just 17 starts. Underwhelming, sure. Nothing that screamed disaster. The disaster was still coming.

It arrived in 2006, when Pavano didn't pitch in a single major-league game. He opened the year on the disabled list with a bruised backside from a spring-training mishap, which was already a flat-out strange way to lose two months. Then, on August 15, 2006, he crashed his Porsche into a sanitation truck in West Palm Beach -- his fault, per the police report, with roughly $30,000 in damage to his car and $20,000 to the truck. He didn't tell the Yankees about any of it. He made three rehab starts in the minors while quietly sitting on two fractured ribs, and only got checked out on August 28 -- thirteen days after the crash, and only after the team told him they wanted him back in the rotation.

Cashman wasn't shy about how that landed. "I've got an army of people here that we provide to put our players in the best position possible to succeed, and I don't want anybody to sabotage that by holding back," he said. "And clearly here, for a period of time, that took place." That's about as pointed as a GM gets in public, and it set the tone for the rest of Pavano's time in pinstripes -- a guy the clubhouse no longer fully trusted.

The Trust Problem

That Mussina quote came in spring 2007, and it wasn't an outlier. Joe Torre, asked how much work Pavano had to do to win back the room, called it "sizable," adding: "You have to walk into this clubhouse, dress next to these guys and carry your share of the load. That's what it amounts to." Whether the rib injury was exactly as bad as advertised is something nobody outside that car will ever really know (Pavano insisted it was legitimate, and broken ribs are, in fact, broken ribs). But the concealment did the damage that the injury alone couldn't have.

Pavano actually opened 2007 as the Opening Day starter -- Chien-Ming Wang got hurt late in spring training, and the job fell to Pavano by default. He threw four solid innings against Tampa Bay before a four-run fifth. His next start was actually good -- seven innings, two earned runs -- but he came out of it with elbow pain that wouldn't go away. He landed on the 15-day DL on April 15 and had Tommy John surgery on June 5. Two starts, then done for the year.

2008 brought a version of hope. Pavano rehabbed all the way back and returned to the rotation in August, making seven starts down the stretch of a season the Yankees would finish outside the playoffs for the first time since the 1994 strike. He went 4-2 with a 5.77 ERA over 34.1 innings -- not good, but at least he was pitching. It was also, as it turned out, the last anyone in the Bronx would see of him. His contract expired that winter, and the Yankees didn't bring him back.

What He Left Behind

Twenty-six starts. $39.95 million. A 5.00 ERA over four years that were supposed to anchor the rotation behind Andy Pettitte and Wang. The New York Post's George King hung the "American Idle" tag on him somewhere along the way, and it stuck for good reason -- it's hard to think of a Yankees free-agent contract that produced less baseball for more money until Jacoby Ellsbury came along a decade later.

Here's the part that actually stings, though. Pavano signed with Cleveland in 2009, got flipped to Minnesota mid-season, and then had a legitimately excellent 2010 -- 17-11, 3.75 ERA, 32 starts, 221 innings, leading the American League outright in complete games (seven) and tying for the league lead in shutouts (two). He started the first regular-season game ever played at Target Field and won it. The guy who couldn't stay on a mound in the Bronx was suddenly a workhorse in Minnesota, the exact pitcher the Yankees thought they were signing back in 2004, just five years and one different uniform too late.

He never got that healthy again for long -- a ruptured spleen from shoveling snow wiped out his 2013, and he retired in February 2014 with a career line of 108-107, a 4.39 ERA, and 17.0 WAR across 14 seasons. Solid, unspectacular, and probably a fair MLB career on the whole. It's just that four of those years, and nearly $40 million of somebody else's money, belonged to New York -- and New York got almost nothing back for it.