After dismal playoffs, expect Yanks to make changes

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DETROIT -- He stood in the on-deck circle, stone-still and stone-faced, watching the Tigers, of all teams, celebrate one of the unlikeliest postseason series wins of the wild-card era. And then Alex Rodriguez slowly knocked the weighted donut off the end of his bat, turned into the visitors' dugout at Comerica Park and walked into an offseason of utter uncertainty.

Where does A-Rod, after the most frustrating year of what already seems to be a Hall of Fame career, go from here? And what about his Yankees, whitewashed by a wild-card team that won only 19 of its final 50 games in the regular season?

Trade A-Rod? Blow up the team and start over? Fire Joe Torre? Rip up the coaching staff? Revamp the front office? Start from scratch? That's all on the table, and more. Such was the total team failure of the Yankees this postseason -- and, more pointedly, A-Rod's personal meltdown.

"I haven't even thought about next year," a downcast Brian Cashman, the team's once-again beleaguered general manager, said in a crowded hallway after the Yankees' loss in their American League Division Series against the Tigers. "I wasn't even expecting to think about next year."

No, this one was a stunner by anyone's reckoning. The mighty Yankees, after all, had the best record in the league and the best lineup in the game. The Tigers played terribly in the second half of the season and limped into the postseason after getting swept by the Royals in the final weekend of the regular season. At home.

Really, who saw this coming? Who could have imagined that the Yankees would hit so poorly (.246, including a stretch of 20 straight innings without scoring a run) and pitch maybe worse (a 5.56 ERA, while the Tigers hit .309)?

How could anyone have figured that A-Rod, even after a miserable stretch at the plate this summer, would hit just .071 for the series (1-for-14), a measly single his only contribution?

The Tigers lost 119 games in 2003. And now they've dumped the Yankees, many people's World Series favorites, from the postseason?

"It's incredibly disappointing," Cashman intoned. "I'm stunned."

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where the Yankees' postseasons have gone wrong over the past several years. They won the 2000 World Series against the Mets, and they were just a couple of outs away from winning the 2001 World Series before Luis Gonzalez and the Diamondbacks turned things around. Since then, they've lost in the first round of the postseason three times (2002, '05, '06), in the AL Championship Series once ('04) and they lost to the Marlins in the '03 World Series.

Being the Yankees, they haven't been shy about spending money to try to right things, either. Through shrewd and often expensive trades, or by signing the priciest of free agents, they've added Jason Giambi, Randy Johnson, Gary Sheffield, Hideki Matsui, Rodriguez, Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright, Johnny Damon and Bobby Abreu, among others, since the '01 season.