Steinbrenner strikes again

I don't usually do this, and I apologize. In fact, in the two semesters that I've had this column (which may have been two semesters too many, but that's a whole different debate) I have devoted but one article to this topic, and that was only in response to a jealous tirade by a funny little man who wears his pants too low. But I feel like the time has come. Things are starting to get ridiculous. I mean, have you seen the Yankees payroll?

For anyone who hasn't heard, the Yanks entered spring training with (gulp) an estimated $164 milllion payroll. Now I'm not a banker or anything, but $164 million is a serious wad of dough. There are a lot of things you can buy with $164 million.

You could buy LeBron James 3,280 new hummers. You could pay a year's tuition for 4,555 Tufts students. You could buy 164 million items off of the McDonalds dollar menu. You could park at a parking meter for roughly 37,442 years. You could buy my textbooks for the next 328,000 semesters.

Or, you could buy yourself, and your whole team a brand new set of World Series rings, engraved and everything.

That's what jolly old George Steinbrenner is banking on, anyway. In standard Yankee fashion, King George cleaned up in the free agent market, nabbing Hideki Matsui and Jose Contreras, for a cool $15 mil a year combined.

But wait, wasn't there a new labor deal not long ago? Isn't there supposed to be more competitive balance in the league now? Well technically, or at least in the minds of every inhabitant of New York, there is. Because the more Steinbrenner pays his players, the more cash he has to dish out to other teams around the league. So instead of cutting costs, like everyone thought they would have to do after the new labor deal, the Yankees have increased their payroll by about $40 million.

Their payroll is $45 million higher than the next highest team, which coincidentally also happens to be from New York, and is $61 million higher than the Red Sox. The Yankees pay about five times more for their players than the Devil Rays do, which is the largest disparity between the highest and lowest payrolls in any professional sport.

But still, it's not really the money that's upsetting me. And it's not all the championships, and it's not the Curse and it's not 1918, or any of that baloney. It's the excess that bothers me. It's the selfishness.

Right now the Yankees have seven starting pitchers. Six of them, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettite, Jeff Weaver, David Wells, Mike Mussina, and Contreras would easily be a number one on most teams in the league. And the seventh, Sterling Hitchcock, would be a two or three on most clubs, and even a one on some. And this is after they dealt El Duque to the Expos.

This is the very definition of excess. Nobody needs that many starters. And the way things look right now, Contreras will probably be a middle reliever, at least to start the season. I haven't checked my figures or anything, but I doubt if there's any other reliever in baseball (besides a closer) who's making $32 million over the next four years.

And this is what gets under my skin. It's like last season when they were already leading baseball in home runs, and they decided they needed to go get Raul Mondesi, who was leading the Blue Jays in home runs. It's just excess. They don't need it, they just don't want anybody else to have it.

It's like going to a grocery store and buying every single box of Cheerios, just so nobody else can have them, even though you know there's no way in hell that you're going to be able to them eat all before they get stale. Now one person ends up with a whole garage full of wasted Cheerios, and even though you'd love nothing more than to have a delicious bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, you can't, because George Steinbrenner is hoarding all of them. And it's just not right.

I'm not really that bitter about it. Maybe I am a little bitter, but that's not my main problem. I'm not mad at Steinbrenner for getting Contreras over the Red Sox. Boston offered him $40 million for four years, and he still went to the Yankees for $32 million over four.

I'm not even all that mad about the three way trade that sent Bartolo Colon to Chicago instead of Boston, because the fact of the matter is that the Sox didn't even really want Colon _ they wanted Javier Vazquez. (And we'll forget, for the moment that the trade pretty much ended any chance for the Red Sox to make any kind of deal with the Expos for anyone.) I'm not mad about any of that stuff.

I'm mad that Steinbrenner has to rub it in. It's not good enough that the Yankees try to put themselves in a position to win _ they have to do everything they can to put everyone else in a position not to win. And that's what irks me... Their 'If we have everything then no one else can have anything' attitude is a pox on baseball and it shows all too well how unbalanced the league actually is, even with that joke of a labor deal.

Maybe I'm just a bitter Red Sox fan, and maybe nobody in baseball is worried about this. But if I was a GM, I'd head to the grocery store and buy some Cheerios, before Steinbrenner nabs every last one.