Unfortunately for the Yankees, while Sabathia represents the addition of a workhorse pitcher likely in his prime, both Burnett and Lowe are far less certain. In fact, the risk of adding both could have negative ramifications, not just for 2009, but for years to come. Not only are Burnett and Lowe far from sure things, their signing will block better short and long-term moves the team could make.

A rotation with both would likely put Sabathia at the top, Joba Chamberlain at number two, Lowe third, Burnett fourth, and Chien-Ming Wang in the fifth spot. If everyone stays healthy and effective, that should be the best rotation in baseball.

But Burnett has not been a particularly sound bet to stay healthy. He pitched 221 1/3 innings in 2008, but just 165 2/3 in 2007, and 135 2/3 in 2006. His 135 2/3 innings came after the last season in which he pitched more than 200 innings; the only other time he passed 200 innings, he followed with 23 innings the next season.

And Burnett will likely command a four-year deal at more than $12 million annually in the pitching-starved marketplace, meaning that the Yankees would be on the hook for a massive contract until at least 2012.

Lowe is a better bet to stay healthy based on his track record, pitching 199 1/3 innings or more in each of the past four seasons. However, those were his age 32-35 seasons. The Yankees would likely need to sign Lowe to a four-year deal for similar money to Burnett, meaning they’d get his age 36-39 seasons.

The combination of Lowe’s age and his relatively low strikeout rate (just 6.2 per nine innings in 2008) bode poorly for his long-term success as a frontline starter. Of his ten most comparable pitchers through age 35 at baseball-reference.com, nearly all of them were out of baseball before age 39.

So while neither Burnett or Lowe are great bets over the life of their contracts, locking in both will also keep the Yankees from providing opportunities to the young pitchers they staked much of their 2008 success on: Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy.

Hughes, who is pitching extremely well in the Arizona Fall League, is still one of the best prospects in baseball. Kennedy, who struggled at the major league level but dominated at AAA, also has a bright future. Neither pitcher has anything to prove at AAA, and would likely be trade bait.

And it isn’t as if the Yankees don’t have alternative options to blocking Kennedy and Hughes for years to come. If instead of Burnett and Lowe, the Yankees simply retained Andy Pettitte on a one-year deal (or Mike Mussina should he decide not to retire), Kennedy and Hughes could battle for the open spot in the rotation, with the loser ready to step in should the winner falter. Mexican import Alfredo Aceves could also be an option.

New York could also take the money they would spend on pitching, and instead turn to improving the offense. With the loss of Jason Giambi, the Yankees have an opening at first base. Recently acquired Nick Swisher is an adequate stopgap, but the free agent Mark Teixeira, 28, would provide an in-prime superstar for the money it would cost to bring in Lowe and Burnett.

Teixeira is an offensive upgrade, a terrific defender, and nearly all of his best comparables were productive well into their thirties. (His top comp, Carlos Delgado, just came off a superb age-36 season.)

No baseball move is a sure thing—but the smartest teams give themselves the best possible chance of long-term success by playing the percentages. And the Yankees, should they sign Lowe and Burnett, will be forsaking their best bets for both 2009 and beyond.

Ross Ohlendorf, the pitcher who gave up the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, didn’t appear till paragraph three. It took six paragraphs for The Times to mention any of the Cleveland players by name, and nine to identify catcher Victor Martinez as the one who got the hit.

Those heroics raised the Indians to .500 and lifted Martinez’s batting average to .373, but so what? What mattered was that Martinez had gotten the hit off Ohlendorf, which mattered because Ohlendorf was not Joba Chamberlain—because Joba Chamberlain did not play—possibly because Joba Chamberlain was nursing a sore leg. Joba Chamberlain’s leg.

Everything about the Yankees begins with Joba. This might seem a bit peculiar, if you look at the plain facts. Chamberlain is 22 years old and his total major-league pitching experience adds up to less than four full games’ worth. Brandon Webb of the Arizona Diamondbacks threw more consecutive scoreless innings last year than Joba Chamberlain has thrown innings, period.

But the Yankees are a hermetic realm, like North Korea, where nobody wants to focus on the actual. Joba is their heroic legend. In real life, the Yankees are off to another tepid start. The hitters aren’t hitting; the pitching looks thin and watery. They have been outscored by their opponents this season and seem unsure, if not baffled, about how to catch up with—and that is the operative phrase, not “hold off” or “pull away from”—the Boston Red Sox.

This is why Hank Steinbrenner and the fans want Joba, right away and plenty of him. It’s early still, naturally, and these Yankees are supposed to be built—and, more specifically, to be building—for the long haul. But in the longer haul, they have not won a World Series since the Clinton administration.

What Yankee fans crave, and the owner craves even more, is immediate gratification that never ends. The Yankee dream is of relentless perfection: 162 wins, a pennant and a World Series sweep—this year and last year and forever. The dream is that no one can ever even touch the Yankees.

When Joba lets go a 100-mile-per-hour fastball, for four-tenths of a second that vision comes true. The ball is not hittable. It will not be hit. The guy from the other team with the bat is a marker. They might as well put a coat rack in the batter’s box.

Thus far only the hand of God can stop him: a plague of insects swirling in his face in Cleveland in the playoffs last year, a rain-wet pitcher’s mound in Chicago last week. The Chicago game was his first major-league loss, and Google flagged it above my e-mail inbox as the most noteworthy news item of the moment. Take away the Joba part, and the story would be “Twenty-Two-Year-Old Middle-Relief Pitcher Loses Game.”

Hank Steinbrenner, standing in the knee-deep footprints of his father, can’t afford to have his Yankees shrink to merely life-size. So the New Boss fixed on Joba as the subject of his first defining outburst, telling The Times that “you have to be an idiot” to keep Chamberlain cooped up in the bullpen as a setup man.

The original Steinbrenner could hardly have done better. By claiming Joba as his own—the Pride of Hankenstein!—Hank Steinbrenner put his handpicked manager and his inherited general manager in a box. Joe Girardi and Brian Cashman had already planned to try developing Chamberlain into a starting pitcher over time. Steinbrenner endorsed the organizational goal, but absolved himself of any responsibility for how to get there.

Now every move Girardi or Cashman might make with Joba—into the rotation, out of the rotation, down to the minors for more work—is a matter of obedience or disobedience to the owner (and his uncompromising desire to win). If Joba does become an ace starter, it was Hank’s idea, and it should have happened sooner. If Joba doesn’t make it, it’s because somebody messed up.

Under these theatrics, the Yankees are wrestling with some long-standing problems of baseball philosophy: What’s the right thing to do with an arm like Joba’s? And how do you make that happen?

Part of the problem is practical. What Chamberlain brings to the mound is extraordinary, but it’s all physics and meat. Throwing 100 mph is rare, and throwing 100 mph on target is even more rare. The hardest part, though, is doing that over and over again without anything falling apart. That was the concern behind last year’s Joba Rules, which kept the Yankees from calling on Chamberlain too often or for too long.

Young pitchers, particularly the superhuman ones, are fragile goods and unreliable. Twelve months ago, at the age of 20, Phil Hughes was Roger Clemens, only better. Then after six innings of no-hit ball against the Rangers, he pulled a hamstring in the seventh. Later on came an ankle injury. This year, Hughes is winless and, along with the youthful Ian Kennedy, is part of the shambles of the starting rotation—the shambles that makes Hank Steinbrenner wonder why Joba is sitting around waiting to pitch in relief.

Still, despite himself, Steinbrenner is on to something when he worries about underusing Chamberlain. In his current job, setting up Mariano Rivera (as, everyone notes, Rivera once set up John Wetteland), Joba is working on only a small part of the craft of pitching. He doesn’t worry about upsetting the hitters’ timing or fooling them into getting wrong, let alone working out a plan for a second or third time through a batting order. He flattens them with the hard stuff—a 10-pitch eighth inning against Cleveland in his return to the mound, an 11-pitch eighth inning the next day—and leaves them helpless for Rivera.

But only Rivera has ever been Rivera. And he was in his mid-20s when he reached the big leagues. Chamberlain’s debut was more like an extended version of the first season of a 21-year-old pitcher named Armando Benitez. The first thing Benitez did on a major-league mound was to strike out Albert Belle. Throwing 98 mph, he went on to strike out 14 hitters in 10 innings, giving up only one run.

Why tamper with success? Benitez became strictly a short-haul pitcher, averaging only 55 innings a year. He never had to work his way into and out of a fourth-inning jam, then come back for the fifth. By the numbers, he had a long and successful career. Ask a Mets fan if Benitez got his talent’s worth.

Between the perils of too much and too little work—the strain of the starter and the ease of the setup man—there is another, less sparkling option. “The best place for a rookie pitcher is long relief,” Earl Weaver wrote in 1984, in Weaver on Strategy.

“The manager doesn’t know what the pitcher can do in the majors,” Weaver wrote. “He has an idea and makes judgments about his talents, but a manager must see the pitcher in game conditions. When the manager puts the rookie pitcher into a game and the rookie comes through a few times, the manager begins evaluating.”

The Weaver method would have Chamberlain cleaning up after the other pitchers, keeping the game together through the middle innings, stringing together experience while building up his endurance. But Earl Weaver didn’t manage in New York. The only game he was trying to win at was baseball.

Also from the Observer, Howard Megdal finds it hard to believe that the Yankees would let Johan Santana go to another team.

But according to numerous reports, the reason the deal didn’t happen had far less to do with the package of players involved than it did with money—Santana, who is a free agent after the 2008 season, would need to be signed to a contract somewhere in the neighborhood of six years, $150 million.

It’s not too late, and the Yankees may rally as they did in the Alex Rodriguez sweepstakes some weeks back, which cast a dubious light on Hank’s grasp of the words “deadline” and “out.” But if the Yankees let either factor keep them from Johan Santana, the more than $400 million in total salary commitments they’ve signed on for since the season ended were little more than jogging in place.

“The deadline is the deadline,” Steinbrenner told the New York Times on Dec. 4. “I extended it a few hours more, and that was it. So it’s done.”

And the Daily News reported that the final deal the Yankees turned down included Hughes, Cabrera, a AA pitcher in Jeff Marquez with a mediocre strikeout rate, and a A-level singles hitter in Mitch Hilligoss.

While Hughes would be a real loss, his spot in the rotation would be filled by the best pitcher in baseball. It is unclear just whether Melky Cabrera will be a star. And neither Marquez or Hilligoss are guaranteed to be much of anything.

The worst part of the non-deal is that the favorites to nab Santana are the Boston Red Sox. And the Yankees, by dropping out of the bidding publicly, have given Minnesota less leverage to extract talent from New York’s primary competition for the AL East.

Perhaps Hank believes that, as with A-Rod, any player or team is bound to come begging to the New York Yankees eventually. Or maybe the Yankees, having spent to retain Rodriguez, Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, are finally at the bottom of their Scrooge McDuck-sized pile of money.

But Santana is the finest pitcher to become available in many years. Through revenue sharing, a larger percentage of teams are able to lock up their top players to long-term contracts. The top pitchers simply don’t hit the free agent market—they are either traded or signed.

Once before in recent years, the Yankees walked away from a free agent who was in his prime: Carlos Beltran. The Yankees elected not to beat the Mets’ offer, even reportedly turning down an overture from his agent, Scott Boras, to play for slightly less money. They stayed with the aged Bernie Williams in center, and while Beltran has flourished in Queens, the Yankees have enjoyed a fraction of his production and defense in center ever since.

Minnesota has to trade Santana. The team cannot afford to sign him (or, at least, is unwilling to do so), and they do not want to lose the best pitcher in baseball for nothing more than compensatory draft picks.

But if the Yankees aren’t willing to pay for Santana, another team will. New York will be reliant on talented but aging hitters, a starting rotation hugely full of promise but short on track record, and a bullpen that currently consists of Mariano Rivera, talented but unproven commodities like recently acquired Jonathan Albaladejo, and yes, Kyle Farnsworth.

("I think he's here to stay," Cashman said of Farnsworth December 3. "I doubt we're going to move him, because we're going to need him.")

Chien-Ming Wang in a Game 1. Kyle Farnsworth in the eighth inning. And Johan Santana on the Red Sox. It’s hard to believe the Yankees are letting this happen.

According to the New York Times, the Yankees are willing to offer incentives to push the contract beyond the $300 million mark if Rodriguez passes current all-time home run leader Barry Bonds.

The specifics of the agreement still need to be drafted and approved by Scott Boras, Rodriguez’s agent. Boras, however, did not participate in the meetings between Rodriguez and the Yankees that led to the deal.

The agreement came following a public rapprochement that defied the statements of the Yankees, but fit perfectly with the realities of the marketplace and the needs of the team.

While the Yankees said this past spring that they would not negotiate with Rodriguez during the 2007 season, they went back on their word months later in an effort to keep him from reaching the open market. Again after Rodriguez opted out of his contract, the Yankees said they would not negotiate with him under any circumstances.

“If you don’t want to be a Yankee and paid what you’re being paid, we don’t want you, that’s the bottom line,” Yankees acting managing partner Hank Steinbrenner told the New York Times just after learning of Rodriguez’s decision.

But late last week, when a friend of Rodriguez at Goldman Sachs, John Mallory, reached out to Gerald Cardinale, another Goldman Sachs partner who had worked with the Yankees, the two sides began exchanging proposals.

The concession made by Rodriguez was to negotiate directly with the Yankees in place of his agent, Boras, who normally conducts negotiations without his player. Much media speculation has indicated that Rodriguez’s decision represents some kind of acrimonious break with Boras.

But Boras was likely a willing participant in the contract kabuki. Not only has this happened before, it has even happened with Rodriguez. In 1993, A-Rod, drafted by Seattle, went against the advice of his agent Boras and accepted a contract with a $1.3 million signing bonus. And in 2002, Andruw Jones negotiated a 5-year, $75 million contract extension with the Atlanta Braves with his father, not Boras.

In both cases, the players remained Boras clients.

This time, Rodriguez may well have found that the likely suitors were not prepared to meet or exceed even the paltry $25.2 million annual salary he had been earning. The Angels appeared interested, as were the Dodgers, and even the Mets spoke to Boras.

But if Rodriguez ended up with most of what he wanted, it’s the Yankees who should be the most relieved. Contract terms aside, any of their alternatives at third base would have represented a massive downgrade from Rodriguez. While World Series MVP Mike Lowell is on the market, his 2007 campaign, which represents a performance out of context with the rest of his career, was roughly two thirds as productive as Rodriguez’s 2007, which closely mirrors his 2005 season.

In-house option Wilson Betemit, meanwhile, provided an alternative at a lower cost—and likely slightly lesser offensive production than Lowell.

And the Florida Marlins’ Miguel Cabrera, while an offensive player to rival Rodriguez, would have cost a number of top prospects in any trade, such as pitchers Philip Hughes and Joba Chamberlain. Even if the Yankees wanted to part with them, they would be hard-pressed to find talent remotely close to those two on a thin free-agent market.

So they’ve got Rodriguez, once again. Now all they need is a ring.

We know that Girardi accepted to a three-year, $7.5 million deal. But precisely what else he agreed to still remains unclear.

During a conference call on Tuesday afternoon, both Girardi and Hank Steinbrenner, the son of owner George Steinbrenner who appears to be running the team at the point, avoided questions about how active ownership will be in baseball decisions during a conference call Tuesday afternoon.

Girardi also chose not to go into detail about his clashes with ownership during a one-year stint as manager of the Florida Marlins. Despite exceeding on-field expectations and winning National League Manager of the Year honors in 2006, he was fired, after reportedly engaging in a shouting match with owner Jeff Loria.

“I never chose to go into the particulars of the Florida situation because I didn’t think it would benefit anyone,” Girardi said. “But I have learned the benefit of relationships, the benefit of sticking together. If you don’t have that, it’s not a great workplace.”

He said he received no guarantees from upper management that the interference Yankee managers in the past have often had to deal with, and suggested that the best (only?) defense against a management team that tried to cut Torre’s pay following 12 playoff appearances in 12 years would be to hold himself to the same standard.

“I have high expectations for myself and the players—I don’t think the expectations up above will exceed that,” Girardi said. “I’m wise enough to see when we’re not playing up to potential, and I know from my time here as a player that you’re going to hear about it one way or another.”

Asked about the possibility of facing an ultimatum along the lines of George Steinbrenner’s statement that Torre’s “job is on the line” during the team’s ALDS series against the Cleveland Indians, Girardi said, “I didn’t ask for assurances, so I’m not going to worry about that.”

Unfortunately for the Yankees, early indications are that Hank doesn’t plan to worry about it either—he’ll just do what comes naturally for George’s son. He’s already “personally insisted” that young pitcher Joba Chamberlain be moved to the starting rotation. The Chamberlain-to-the-rotation aspect shouldn’t concern Yankee fans—it’s probably a good move. It’s the “personally insisting” part.

When asked which, if any, areas he’d leave strictly to his baseball people, Steinbrenner named exactly none.
“The big thing on Chamberlain situation is that it’s something we all want at this stage, it’s something our preference is,” he said. “Bottom line is, that’s all I can say. As for the situation with management in Miami, that has already been addressed by Joe.” One question later, Steinbrenner followed up by saying, “Obviously, it’s important I let Joe and Brian take the floor now.”

For his part, Girardi expressed disappointment over losing M.V.P. Alex Rodriguez, while echoing the Yankee line that Rodriguez is completely in the past. (General Manager Brian Cashman reiterated this later in the call.) As for free agents Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera, and Andy Pettitte, who has a player option, Girardi expressed hope that all three of his former teammates would return.

“Obviously, they’re important Yankees,” Girardi said. “All three of them had very good years. They’re very good players. But sometimes things just don’t work out. Those players will be approached by the Yankees, and hopefully something will be worked out.”

Regarding Girardi’s coaching staff, all that is known thus far is that Torre’s bench coach, Don Mattingly, will not be part of it. Mattingly, a co-finalist for the manager position, said through his agent Monday that he would not return to the Yankees in 2008. Tony Pena, the Yankees’ first base coach who was the third man interviewed for the position, indicated that he wished to return in 2008, according to Cashman.

“It’s not a situation where I will dictate which coaches Joe can hire,” Cashman said. “I didn’t do that with Joe Torre, and I won’t do it with Joe Girardi.”

On this point, too, Hank Steinbrenner remained silent.