THE SHOW must go on, and so it did on the biggest stage in The Bronx last night – even without Hideki Matsui, even without Gary Sheffield, and even without Jason Giambi.
The show went on with spare parts and not yet (if ever) ready for primetime players. Melky Cabrera, Bubba Crosby and Andy Phillips were in the Yankees lineup against Texas, with neither refunds nor rebates to the playing customers who had become accustomed to seeing an entire lineup of above-the-title marquee names.
“We rehearse out here in front of everybody,” said Joe Torre, more aware than anybody that when a player dresses in pinstripes he’s expected to perform. “And we’re doing it on a very tough stage that no matter what you say, I don’t think you can prepare [a young player] for it.” A third of the Yankees order that most certainly accounts for more than 33-percent of its muscle and production is out for varying lengths of time – Giambi for maybe a few days, Sheffield for maybe a couple of more weeks, Matsui for maybe for the remainder of the season. And the Yankees are grasping at straws when a decade ago they grasped Darryl Strawberry.
Make no mistake, even as the payroll has continued to hover near or above $200M, the Yankees have cut back significantly on the amount of money they invest in bench players. The Knicks might be an exception to the rule, but it’s fair to suggest that you most often get what you pay for. The Yankees right now are not only paying coolie wages to Cabrera, Crosby and Phillips, they are likely to pay for it.
Regarding Cabrera, the 21-year-old promoted last week from Columbus with a Triple A-leading .385 batting average, Torre said the Yankees, “had [had] no plans to have him up with us this year.” Regarding Phillips, the 28-year-old with 85 career big league at bats, Torre said, “He’ll be a player, he’ll hit …
whether it’s here or someplace else.” Regarding Crosby, the 29-year old with 184 major league ups, the hierarchy has made it perfectly clear he’s regarded as a late-inning defensive replacement.
The Yankees compete against the rest of the American League, but they also compete against their dynastic heritage. They are measured against their own gold standard, even as they’ve steadily devalued the bench from one year to the next.
Yes, of course, the quality of both the starting rotation and the bridge to their closer are the most glaring differences between then and now, between the teams that won four out of five Series beginning in 1996 and the ones that have gone oh-for-the-millennium.
But there’s an acute difference in the quality depth of their bench players.
Back in the day, the Yankees had either Wade Boggs or Charlie Hayes on the bench. They had Rock Raines or Strawberry or Cecil Fielder to call off the bench, or they had Shane Spencer, Jim Leyritz, Glenallen Hill or Ruben Sierra. It was a formidable array, a latter day Murderers’ Row of replacements.
George Steinbrenner could afford to splurge back then, back in the era when Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams were young and under the team’s contractual thumb, back in the era when there was no luxury tax or revenue sharing. Now, every dollar the Boss spends might be tripled by taxes. So the front office splurges on the top of the roster and purges the pricey leftovers.
Maybe the Yankees wouldn’t have been able to compensate had, say, Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez and Boggs all been out of the lineup 10 years ago. But they would have been better prepared to cope with the absences.
And they wouldn’t have been holding auditions on stage in front of a live audience, that’s for sure.
