Filip Bondy

The Yankees are dead. Long live the Mets.

In New York, nobody has much patience for non-playoff baseball teams — even those with 26 world championships, a 13-year postseason streak and a new, grandiose stadium on the horizon.

The Yankees are mired hopelessly in third place right now in the AL East, and all that’s left is a postmortem analysis and a jolting prescription for the future, which is actually quite simple. The Yanks must remember again that they are the Yanks, and not the Oakland A’s.

It is no great mystery where things went wrong this season. General manager Brian Cashman decided he wanted to be Billy Beane. And although it’s a nice, feel-good notion to develop your own homegrown stars through the minor-league system, the Steinbrenner Yankees never did that before when it came to starting pitchers.

From Catfish Hunter to David Cone to Roger Clemens, the club’s aces were traditionally mercenaries, imported to get the job done for two or three years before retiring or moving elsewhere.

Going the youth route
Cashman, however, decided to change all that because he and the Tampa cabal experienced a troubled history recently while chasing outside talent pools. In direct competition with Theo Epstein of the Red Sox, Cashman signed the wrong former Marlin (Carl Pavano vs. Josh Beckett), the wrong former Japanese star (Kei Igawa vs. Daisuke Matsuzaka) and the wrong former Arizona Diamondback (Randy Johnson vs. Curt Schilling).

Having been burned so many times before, Cashman went the youth route. He turned his back on Johan Santana, refusing in a proposed deal to give up the quintessential mediocre prospect, outfielder Melky Cabrera. Instead he dived headlong into the 2008 season with a projected starting rotation that included young arms Chien-Ming Wang, Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy and swingman Joba Chamberlain.

What followed was an unmitigated disaster, and one that should not have been wholly unexpected. You place your chips on immature arms, no matter how promising, and a raft of injuries and setbacks are bound to follow.

In New York, fans witnessed this sort of meltdown a dozen years ago with the Mets, when that organization figured Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson and Jason Isringhausen were the starting rotation of the future.

Going down
One by one, these young Yankee arms and tendons met similar fates. Each one went down for at least a large chunk of the season. And although Wang and Chamberlain retain substantial promise, nobody even knows whether Hughes (9.00 ERA in six starts) or Kennedy (8.17 in 10 appearances) owns enough talent to succeed at the major-league level.

This has left the Yankees in the uncomfortable position of slapping together makeshift rotations throughout the season. Even the unexpected resurrection of Mike Mussina wasn’t sufficient to offset the disastrous starting situation. As of Sept. 11, the Yankees owned a 4.38 ERA, 18th in the majors, despite mostly solid efforts out of the bullpen.

You can talk about the offense underachieving, and you’d be right there too. The Bronx Bombers were batting .271, seventh best in the majors, but their run production was ranked 13th. Alex Rodriguez had regressed into familiar non-clutch performances. Injuries to Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui didn’t help, and this was a team with too many DHs, too few Golden Gloves.

Yet those were not the reasons the Yankees have dropped so far, so fast. They were goners because the starters collapsed and because the Tampa Bay Rays emerged from nowhere. They failed because Cashman threw money at position players, but not at starters.

From here, then, there needs to be a radical change of philosophy and course. Hank Steinbrenner needs to sit down with Cashman and tell him, flat out: We are not the A’s. If you want to be general manager of a small market team, that can easily be arranged.

It’s time to chase some free-agent pitchers again, to start making deals, to fill a rotation with 30 year-olds instead of 22 year-olds. The Yankees have a new, expensive stadium to fill, demanding outrageous ticket prices. They can no longer be outbid for the Santanas and CC Sabathias of the world.

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The Yankees’ dynasty of the late ‘90s was built around a largely homegrown cast of position players, and with talented temps on the mound. Somewhere along the way, things got reversed in the Bronx. The Yankees chased expensive sluggers, and fell in love with their starters in the farm system.

That romance has failed. The sooner the Yankees remember their bullying, big-market roots, the faster their recovery.

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