BOSTON — A little more than 12 hours after Alex Rodriguez tied Willie Mays for fourth on baseball’s career home run list, Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman made it clear that the team would not be paying him a bonus for doing so.
“We have the right but not the obligation to do something,” Cashman said to reporters before Saturday’s 4-2 win over the Red Sox. “And that’s it. It’s not ‘you do this, you get that.’ ”
With that assertion, Cashman became the first team executive to acknowledge publicly what the Yankees have said privately for months: They have no intention of paying Rodriguez $6 million in exchange for the rights to market his home run feat, a payment that would also come with a 50 percent penalty because the team is already over the luxury-tax threshold.