It's not best for the Red Sox to raise the price on a free agent whom the Yankees are going to get to make the Yankees pay a higher price for the player. Doing this would hurt the Red Sox because agents of future players will use these players as comps. For example, it's not a coincidence that the Yankees' first offer to Sabathia was a little higher than what Santana got with the Mets. We don't want that to happen with future players the Red Sox want when the Yankees are either out of the picture or not interested. The main, if not the only, example of when the Yankees are out of the picture for a potentially expensive free agent is when the Red Sox are going for one who plays a position the Yankees already have filled, like when the Red Sox signed J.D. Drew while the Yankees already had Cabrera and Damon for CF and Abreu for RF.
12/09 edit: When the Red Sox signed John Lackey during the 2009-10 offseason, his agent used A.J. Burnett's contract as a comp. Had the Red Sox driven up the price of Burnett during the 2008-09 offseason, it likely would have cost the Red Sox more to sign Lackey.
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Your argument using Lackey as an example was interesting. Driving the price up on Lackey may have saved us from that 5 year deal which is not looking so good at the moment. It also would have freed up money that could be sued to sign Cliff Lee.
That said, I agree with your point. In my industry the CEO's of the top 3 companies meet informally to discuss guidelines on pricing and salaries so they avoid price/recruiting wars. That's called collusion. The Red Sox are part of a legal monopoly, and while not bidding the price up in self-interest is not collusion, it is just one step removed.
Regardless of what AJ ended up getting, nobody could force the Red Sox to pay more than they want for Lackey, and the same for other teams. A-Rod is making 30 million, not many players are close to that, and likely never will be.
They could expect the Yankees to return the favor on AJ.. That smacks of lets not compete against each other for the same FA.
You want AJ, let us go after Lackey without driving up the price. Both players end up receiving less because of the lack of a bidding war between the 2 biggest markets, which is precisely what FA is supposed to be in return for most players remaining as wage slaves for 6 years.
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