Pitchers & Catchers & A-Rod!

Tuesday is the optional day for pitchers and catchers to report to the Yankee's Spring Training camp at Legends Field in Tampa. Regardelss of whether or not the trade goes through, everyone at the camp will be talking about A-Rod.

They say he's the best player in baseball, and the Yankees need some help with the Red Sox: Theo Epstein and the new owners are doing a great job of building a great team for years to come. It seems inevitable that they will break the curse of the Bambino sometime in the next few seasons – or will the curse continue with their failure to trade for A-Rod themselves?

After Boonie's accident, you can't fault the Yankees for going after A-Rod once the Texas Rangers agreed to pay 1/3 of his salary – A-Rod will improve the team, and the Yankees are the first team since he left Seattle to be able to get him at a reasonable salary. And it's the perfect countermove to the very aggressive moves of the Sox. At the same time it improves the team, it makes the Red Sox Nation wonder why their wunderkind Theo couldn't get the deal done.

But the trade brings up another issue: the %*&#! Boss doesn't seem to realize that the players, not the owner, are the Yankees. Back in the 1980s, the Boss kept going for past-their-prime, slow sluggers who looked like football players and whose best position was DH. Stuck with too many players at first and DH, he would also stack up players at positions where we had good players, like Roy Smalley at shortstop when we already had Bucky Dent. The result was unbalanced expensive teams that went longer than any other Yankee teams in history without going to the post-season.

Luckily for us, the Boss talked his way out baseball: apparently Steinbrenner didn't understand the descriptions of what might happen, and mistakenly chose banishment over what was only going to be a suspension. The result was that Gene "Stick" Michael (the shortstop from the horrible Horace Clark years in the 1960s), was able to build a team built around pitching, on-base percentage, long at-bats and nice guys in the clubhouse. A team with a home-grown core of Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera (plus a key player, Paul O'Neill, brought from Cincinnati in a trade for a home-grown center fielder made redundant by Bernie).

They grew up together and had some of the best regular and post-season accomplishments in the history of the game. Not just winning 4 out of 5 World Series, but at one point in the process going 27 and 0 in postseason games at a time when the number-crunching wizard owner of the Red Sox calculates that the multiple playoff rounds with short, five-game series make the chance of winning the World Series just 15% AFTER getting into the playoffs. (2003, Game 7, 8th Inning, 1 Out, American League Championship: Red Sox 5, Yankees 2. The Yankees win in 11 innings with a home run from Aaron Boone, whose offseason basketball injury leads to the trade for A-Rod for a replacement third baseman.)

Steinbrenner has thrown his weight around this winter and acquired SEVEN former All-Stars (assuming A-Rod signs). His latest redundant, aging player may or may not turn out to be Lofton, whom the Boss wants to takes over center field from Bernie. If that happens, there will only be two position players from all those great World Series teams, and part of the joy of baseball is following your players every year, with the radio on in the background while they go through the long season. This will be a very interesting season, but Andy Pettitte, RIP. Your teams were great.

When George Costanza worked for the Yankees on Seinfeld, he had this to say to three Astro employees who became his drinking buddies,

"No Yankee son of a bitch is ever going to Houston, you Texas bastards!"

George Costanza understood what George Steinbrenner does not.