"we're All In!"

Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal, perhaps better known to Yankee fans as the Boss’s daughter or the new boss Hal’s sister, said this past Wednesday that her family intends to keep the team in the family for eternity. 

Now, I know there are some Yankee fans out there who feel like it’s been an eternity since our last championship and are probably less than enthused by  Hal’s tight grip on the free-agent purse strings these last two winters and a rotation filled with more fault lines than San Francisco Bay.

Brian Cashman’s no fool and he understands exactly what “turn the clock back to be big-game hunters” is code for in Yankee Universe. 

And knowing how he likes to play it small when it comes to deal-making — and even smaller still when it comes to managing expectations where it involves Checkbook Hal’s budget fetish — his Hard Rock remarks can only mean that with the savings realized from those expiring fossil contracts and a few others, if even one or two farm kids can stick with El Kraken in the Bronx this year then Hal will at long last bag his elusive unicorn of bringing payroll under the competitive balance tax threshold. 

Most seem to forget Hal wasn’t always a tightwad. He dropped nearly a half billion dollars the first time  his father’s team missed the postseason. The problem then was dad had already been running payroll well beyond the tax threshold for years, so the business model was already strained. Large extended contracts to multiple players with big mileage on their odometers had win-now-pay-sooner-than-later stamped all over it. But it was a must-win situation and so they won. Man, did they ever. It was a sight to behold.  The aftermath, though, has been a slow rot drawn out far too long by an obsessive love affair with past glory and a blind eye to new romances that has allowed far too much young talent to languish or flee the system unrequited.

A big hairy Harper, a man-eating Machado, a killer Kershaw and a few other critters would make nice trophies for a big-game hunting GM trying to lead his team out of the jungle to championship contention. 

The team may not be making all the moves we’d like to see as quickly as we’d like to see them. But all the moves are  being made with winning, spending, family and eternity in mind.

Meet the new boss… same as the old boss.