The Yankees need to start getting younger and to go back like they used to be at one time where they could actually develop their own players. It's not like they have to do this like most other teams do to find quality players that are cheap until they hit their first big free contract in free agency. We all know the Yankees have enough money, but they have to do this to get a solid core of good young players. Even the people they have that are good aren't getting younger. Even Jeter is on the wrong side of 30. I think what most people tend not to remember is that even prime free agents when they come on the market are usually in the last couple years of their peek seasons before they start to go on a eventual decline. Most teams will try to keep their best players even after that before they will let them go making some of the players even older.
The part were you can really start to tell the down side to just spending on everything they need is the pitching. It's hard enough to maintain good pitching in an ideal situation. There is a saying that goes something like, "There is no such thing as a pitching prospect". That's because out off all the young pitchers coming up something always happens to them or they get hurt or they just don't work out. It's like playing Russian roulette with five chambers loaded. To get to the point where you can have good pitching besides just being lucky from year to year you have to have a lot of promising people in your system that keep coming in where you can hope at least a few of them will pan out into decent pitchers, and then you need to make wise decisions on the free agent market and not just pick the top named star unless he is really worth it. The Yankees haven't been good at either in a long time.
If people remember back to the 1998 season where the Yankees might have had one of the best seasons of all time, they had a lot of people on the team they developed themselves. Of course I think they also came from the time a few years before that when the Boss wasn't involved in it so maybe that was why they were able to have that many good people coming through. It makes you wonder.
To be honest I think a lot of the reason the Yankees haven't won the Series in the past 5 or 6 years has a lot to do with bad luck. In a short series the lesser team still has a chance to win. When you have to play 2 or 3 of them to win the series it isn't hard to imagine the best team not winning. A few things go differently and they probably would have won a couple more. However unless they retool in some ways, which they don't want to do, they seem destined to regress or at least stagnate for the time being.
The part were you can really start to tell the down side to just spending on everything they need is the pitching. It's hard enough to maintain good pitching in an ideal situation. There is a saying that goes something like, "There is no such thing as a pitching prospect". That's because out off all the young pitchers coming up something always happens to them or they get hurt or they just don't work out. It's like playing Russian roulette with five chambers loaded. To get to the point where you can have good pitching besides just being lucky from year to year you have to have a lot of promising people in your system that keep coming in where you can hope at least a few of them will pan out into decent pitchers, and then you need to make wise decisions on the free agent market and not just pick the top named star unless he is really worth it. The Yankees haven't been good at either in a long time.
If people remember back to the 1998 season where the Yankees might have had one of the best seasons of all time, they had a lot of people on the team they developed themselves. Of course I think they also came from the time a few years before that when the Boss wasn't involved in it so maybe that was why they were able to have that many good people coming through. It makes you wonder.
To be honest I think a lot of the reason the Yankees haven't won the Series in the past 5 or 6 years has a lot to do with bad luck. In a short series the lesser team still has a chance to win. When you have to play 2 or 3 of them to win the series it isn't hard to imagine the best team not winning. A few things go differently and they probably would have won a couple more. However unless they retool in some ways, which they don't want to do, they seem destined to regress or at least stagnate for the time being.
