THE PROBLEM IS THE MONEY THEY'RE SPENDING, NOT THE MONEY THEY AREN'T:

All the wrong moves: Yankees are paying price for refusing to play hardball (John Donovan, May 30, 2007, Sports Illustrated)

Hindsight being as eagle-eyed as it is, it's easy to see just where the present-day Yankees went wrong. They tried to restock their farm system and compete at the big league level at the same time. They pulled away from what they do best -- nobody bullies people in baseball with a checkbook quite like the guys in the pinstriped front office, whether it's in the free-agent market or at the trade table -- and that's costing them now.

Face it: These Yankees are dead meat. They might not be completely done, at 14½ games out of first place in the AL East and 8½ behind the wild-card leader with June 1 peeking around the corner. But if I'm looking for medium-well done, this thing already is too far gone. I'm sending it back.

Let's look, with some of that unerring hindsight, at just some of the ways that the Yankees have burned this baby... [...]

4) They forgot just how old they really were. The Yankees saw the aging of their roster coming. They were trying to get younger. That's the whole idea of re-stocking the farm system. It's an admirable goal, and it's needed. But they might have waited too long.

At 29.9 years old the Yankees are among the majors' oldest teams, ranking in the bottom third in average age. That's showing up in a lot of ways: Bobby Abreu's slow start, Johnny Damon's sore wheels, Jason Giambi's heel spurs, Mike Mussina's creaky legs and Mariano Rivera's sudden mortality.

The Michael/Torre/Jeter teams that won were actually built around a nucleus of home-grown talent -- Jeter, Posada, Rivera, Pettite, Mendoza, etc. -- and second-tier stars and seeming scrubs whose skills they evaluated better than others had--Scott Brosius, Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, etc. -- so they were getting bargains. Now they have a wholly unproductive farm system and they pay premium dollar for guys who command that sort of money because they are exactly at or past their peaks. The perception that the Yankees have been unlucky this year is exactly wrong. In fact, they were especially lucky the past couple seasons when this same breakdown was always imminent.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 30, 2007 12:00 PM