Yankees-Santana

This could turn out to be somewhat painful, if Santana enjoys four or five banner years with the Mets, but I just don't think the Yankees should have traded for him. For the past five years, we really haven't had good luck with veteran pitchers, even seemingly dominant left-handers like Randy Johnson. Santana hasn't logged a ton of innings, but almost 900 over the past four years isn't insignificant either. This, plus all the pressure that'd be put on him with the Yankees, he's probably better off in the N.L.

Plus, now the Yankees keep together their core of young guns: Kennedy, Chamberlain, and, of course, Philip Hughes, who was largely rumored to be going to the Twins if the Yankees got Santana. We also get to keep Melky, who's only 23, and are apparently negotiating a long term deal with Cano, who's 25. It's good to have some up and coming homegrown talent in place to lead the team into the future again. If you remember it was homegrowners like Jeter, Pettitte, Williams, Rivera, and Posada that helped lead us to our last series of World Championships.

Back to the pitchers though, it will be interesting to watch how the young guys feed off each other and push each other forward. I keep going back to the days when the Braves had Glavine, Smoltz, and Avery all coming up together, and hope it works out that well - except for Avery of course, but the other two became Hall-of-Famers. Then again, the Braves did add Maddux, which would be akin to the Yankees adding Santana at this stage of his career, but Maddox was a free agent (so the Braves go to keep their young guns and still add a superstar). I guess, we'll have to count on Pettitte for the veteran leadership, althought this whole steroid thing doesn't look good for him. Right, almost forgot about sinkerball specialist Chien Ming Wang...

Ahh, it's still January, but baseball is starting to permeate my mind. Must be the end of football I guess, except for those evil Patriots and their inexorible march toward an undefeated season...

Cheers.

Ralph