Yankees feeling spent
The Boss is embarrassed.
He doesn't mind spending upward of a billion dollars on personnel in just six years if he wins. He doesn't care if people deride him for being a fiscal bully if he wins. He just wants to win.
But when you spend and spend and spend and don't win, your enemies laugh. That's embarrassing.
George Steinbrenner is 76 years old, and the whispers are that he is, for lack of a better description, Not The Man He Used To Be. In other words, he is impatient to win again.
His team last won in 2000, a year in which the Yankees entered the playoffs with a mere 87 victories. That was a close call. So The Boss has spent money -- a whole lot of money -- on ballplayers he and his advisers believed would ensure that the Yankees occupy what The Boss believes to be their rightful place as the last team standing, year after year after year. Mike Mussina. Jason Giambi. Hideki Matsui. Alex Rodriguez. Gary Sheffield. Carl Pavano. Randy Johnson. Johnny Damon. Bobby Abreu. Kevin Brown. All were given eight figures a year. And then there were the extensions for Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera, four more players who took home eight figures a year.
But these players have brought The Boss nothing but frustration and embarrassment. His teams have twice lost postseason series to teams that were not even in existence when The Boss and his partners bought the team. His teams have twice lost to Angels squads with rosters on which The Boss would have great difficulty naming 10 players. His team lost in record-breaking and humiliating fashion to its archrival. And now his team has lost three straight to a Detroit team loaded with players responsible for losing 119 games three short years ago.
So The Boss is asking, ``How can this be?" and is reportedly asking for an important head to be placed on a platter and brought to his office.
There is a problem in associating money with true prowess. The only time money is indisputably important is on the first and 15th of the month when it finds its way to some lucky recipient. But in sports, money is spent in one of two ways. It is spent for past services rendered or it is spent on future expectations. No one in professional team sports gets paid by the day. It's not golf. That being the case, it is very easy to overpay.
It would have been interesting to evaluate the Yankees and Tigers strictly on the basis of what our eyes told us after watching them perform, rather than on the basis of what we know they make. Curtis Granderson or Johnny Damon in center? That would have been a pretty easy call. Granderson was a marvel. But Damon makes 40 times what Granderson does, give or take a Benjamin. Sean Casey or the Giambi/Sheffield combo? Advantage, Detroit. Casey is a nice ballplayer, but he is playing for his third team in a year, and he has never approached the Giambi/Sheffield earning level. But he came up pretty big in the biggest series of his life, didn't he?
Still, it isn't about player comparisons. The Yankee-Detroit series was about two things. It was about simply playing the game correctly, and it was about pitching. And for all the money The Boss spent, it appears he needed to spend a bit more for a couple of pitchers who might have gotten the job done.
All other things equal, had the Yankees played the Tigers to a standoff in other areas, they were fated to lose this series because the clear Detroit edge was in pitching.
Randy Johnson is a first-ballot Hall of Famer who will retire as one of the five best lefthanders that ever played the game (Warren Spahn, Sandy Koufax, Lefty Grove, and Whitey Ford being the other four). He earned $15.7 million this year, despite the fact he is now an erratic back-of-the-rotation starter. He will turn 44 next September and he will be making $17 million while being even less effective than he was this year, when his ERA (exactly 5.00) was far more reflective of the way he pitched than his win total (17). He may be getting $15.7 million en route to $17 million, but that's because of what he was, not what he is. He is now stupendously overpaid.
If you were George Steinbrenner, Brian Cashman, or Joe Torre, whom would you take for your 2007 rotation? Randy Johnson or Justin Verlander? Randy Johnson or Jeremy Bonderman? I might even say, just to make a point, Randy Johnson or Kenny Rogers?
Detroit had both the great young arms (including set-up man extraordinaire Joel Zumaya, the kid I like to call ``WBZ" because he throws 103) and the more effective older ones. I mean, who was that guy pretending to be Kenny Rogers? And I'm sure you knew when Todd Jones left here three years ago he would be saving 37 games for a team on the verge of winning a pennant. Good for him. Please accept my word for it that Todd Jones is one guy you wouldn't mind seeing make $15.7 million.
The 2006 ALCS will feature two cost-effective teams that are growing up together. The Tigers and A's also have deep, talented pitching staffs. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Having the wherewithal to overspend for players is not necessarily a good thing. That's how you wind up with injury-prone mercenaries such as Randy Johnson and Gary Sheffield, as opposed to younger, healthier, and hungrier players. A key older free agent signee who really is the right man in the right place at the right time (i.e. Curt Schilling), well, that's what everyone wants to find. There just aren't many of them. This is hardly an original thought, but the Yankees were better off when they had players such as Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez, guys just below the star level who came to play without personal agendas and bloated self-images.
You know when the Yankees were at their best this year? It was when they had scrappy players such as Melky Cabrera and Andy Phillips in the lineup. The former is a young star in the making and the latter is a classic overachieving glue guy. On the subject of star power, less is unquestionably more. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bill Mueller.
I don't think The Boss has ever bought into this. The Boss has always believed that if you just pile star after star on top of each other, good things will happen.
It doesn't work that way. The only way anyone will ever have to worry about a 27th flag flying atop Yankee Stadium is if they get their pitching in order and then find themselves a few worker bees. That's how they won four out of five. And someone should tell The Boss that firing Joe Torre won't accomplish either of those things.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. His e-mail is ryan@globe.com. 
