Mike Celizic

The Yankees need something. That much is obvious. They are decimated by injuries to some of their biggest hitters, the pitching rotation is thin, the relief corps unsteady and the Boston Red Sox, as of Thursday morning, were three games ahead of New York in the AL East.

What the Yankees need depends on who is talking. Manager Joe Torre says he needs more hitting. The newspapers say he needs pitching. George Steinbrenner, who never has been shy about giving advice, says it’s in the hands of general manager Brian Cashman to deliver the title that was promised before the season began.

If it sounds as if there’s confusion in New York, there is. If it also sounds as if some are wondering whether it’s time to go into panic mode, they are.

The panic is misplaced. If there were a time for that, it should have been in the offseason, when they were preparing to go into the season determined to win the World Series with a starting rotation of an aging Randy Johnson, the reliable Mike Mussina, the untested Chien-Ming Wang, the always injured and erratic Jared Wright, and either Aaron Small or Shawn Chacon.

It was clear from the start that rotation wouldn’t get it done because it hadn’t gotten the job done the year before. Hoping the Big Unit would turn back the clock, that Wright would right his frequently capsized ship, and Small and Chacon would be as good as they were last season was wishful thinking.

You don’t sit up in July and suddenly realize that. Nor can you run down to the local Players R Us store and stock up on everything you need to win the World Series. Deadline trades are for fine-tuning and for adding the one last piece a team needs to get over the top, not for filling half a dozen holes.

The trouble with the Yankees is that it’s always sturm und drang. It’s hard to make panic seem banal, but that’s what the Yankees have accomplished over the years. Whether they’re 20 games in front or half a game behind, there’s always some pimple to obsess over, always some glaring unfilled hole in a lineup that other teams can only dream of assembling. Panic should be saved for special occasions. For the Yankees, a day without panic is like a hot fudge sundae without whipped cream.

Yes, they need help. Hideki Matsui won’t come back from a broken wrist until August at the earliest. Gary Sheffield, another big bat, may not play again this season. Johnny Damon has been dinged up last year and is battling a strained oblique muscle. The pitching staff doesn’t have a truly dominant starter, and the relief corps is thinner than the team thought it would be when the season began.

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When you spend nearly $200 million for hired help, these sorts of holes aren’t supposed to show up. The flaw with that thinking is that the more you spend, the more you all but guarantee problems. To assemble a lineup that expensive, you have to have a lot of older stars on the roster; kids don’t make $20 million a year. And veterans with anywhere from a dozen up to 18 or 20 years in the big leagues either wear down, as Johnson is doing, or get hurt, as Sheffield, Damon and catcher Jorge Posada have been. You can count on it.

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