Yankees fans are something very few people understand. In the only major North American team sport without a salary cap, the Yankees are the Kings of payroll. Everyone outside of this universe will automatically hate the team for this fact alone, let alone the history of winning, competition and any personal moments a fan of another team might have endured.
Add to it the large number of Yankees’ fans living all around the world and the overall misunderstood persona of a northeasterner and you have a recipe for hatred. So when you’re part of the group and you embrace the fact nobody else is going to like your team you then have to have a pretty strong bond within its confines. That is why it’s best if Yankees fans step away from the ledge.
Stop complaining about the self induced payroll.
Stop wanting a move to be made for the sake of making a move.
Yankees fans are certainly not the only fanbase guilty of thinking irrationally, but in a year of confusion, new territories and an uncertain future, it would be wise to practice some restraint.
Let’s start with the age of the team.
The Yankees are old going into 2013. Ichiro Suzuki, Alex Rodriguez, Kevin Youkilis Derek Jeter, Hiroki Kuroda, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera are old. Very old. So old they are now ticking time bombs and we have seen what age can do to each of them. Ichiro was a shell of himself until he came to the Bronx. A-Rod, Youkilis and Pettitte can’t play full seasons. Jeter broke his ankle and was terrible as recently as the first half of 2011.
He has no more range. Kuroda will only except one year deals for motivation. Luckily, four of these guys are first ballot Hall of Famers and the other three are no slouches. Even in their twilight, all of them can be productive to a degree and all of them are unlikely to be here come 2015 except A-Rod (and depending on how Jeter performs these next two seasons).
So the question becomes why are they so old and how do you fix this going forward?
Brian Cashman was given orders by his bosses to cut the payroll under $189 million dollars. There are unbelievably detailed explanations as to why out there to research. At the end of the day, we as fans need to get past the fact billionaires are looking to save millions while we are left spending hundreds.
It’s a sound business model to do what the Yankees are doing and long story short, Hal Steinbrenner is right. The Yankees don’t need to have a $200 million dollar payroll to win. In fact we’ve noticed more recently enormous salaries come back to bite the Yankees, and every other team.
New York will always have flexibility to sign a big name player, but it would be wise to keep the team at the CBA threshold so every four years or so they can dip below it and reset the penalties. That’s all that is being conveyed here. At some point, trimming payroll has to take place, and that time is now.
Trading for one big bat to appease a fanbase or signing one big Josh Hamilton or Zack Greinke type of Free Agent is not going to help matters. If you feel the Yankees are too old, or not talented enough to win in 2013, one player isn’t going to solve that.
New York would be wise to continue to grow its farm system, which is almost in the top third of MLB, and to look to its own talent to sustain a winning model. That’s how it was done in the 1990’s. Build your core from within and sign the remaining “hired guns” to put you over the top.
The Yankees should have no issue doing this and need to start somewhere. Tyler Austin, Slade Heathcott, Gary Sanchez, David Phelps and Michael Pineda need to be part of the New York future. They need to be the reason you can have huge contracts alongside theirs because you’re getting huge production out of minimal salary.
You can’t ship two or three of them at a time for a player going into his early 30’s and think you can win for long periods of time. There just isn’t a proper window for that to happen.
We as fans need to accept that we are not being punished. We are being set up for long-term future success by reverting back to what made the Yankees successful 15 years ago.
The time to embrace this change is now.
