New York gets boost from super subs, but it won't last

	Rookie Melky Cabrera made a game-saving catch to rob Manny Ramirez of a home run on Tuesday. AP
	MAILBAG Tom Verducci will answer select questions from SI.com users in his Baseball Mailbag. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

What do you make of the Yankees' recent success -- they have won 11 of their past 14 games -- with all these no-name players? Does this mean that a team doesn't need a superstar/All-Star at every position to be successful? To be honest, I'd never heard of 75 percent of the White Sox players and they won the World Series last year. Will high-revenue teams now think twice before they throw huge amounts of money at aging superstars?
-- Eric Bukzin, Manorville, N.Y.

The injuries will catch up to the Yankees. Teams often get a short-term boost from these situations because everyone senses a feeling of urgency. But losing front-line players eventually catches up to you. The Cubs and Derrek Lee come to mind. But I will say that the Yankees needed an infusion of youth on their roster. Look at the past four or five teams to win the World Series: They were not loaded with players in their mid-30s and older. Teams like the Yankees and the Giants were breakdowns waiting to happen. Don't forget, the Yankees' money also gives them an edge in the international market, where they have signed such "homegrown" players as Orlando Hernandez, Alfonso Soriano, Chien-Ming Wang, Robinson Cano, Melky Cabrera, etc. Their draft picks have not worked out nearly as well.

What's your take on former SI writer Jeff Pearlman's comments on Slate.com that sportswriters, including you, are pretending that the steroid era is over and not doing the work necessary to truly determine if players are still juiced?
-- Brandon Stahl, Duluth, Minn.

It's something of a valid point, because all of us can always do more. It's also a valid point to say that Pearlman has done no such work himself, so his basis of criticism is questionable. If he thinks it's so easy to walk into a Dominican pharmacy and bust Albert Pujols for steroids, what's he waiting for? I've said many times that of course players are still using performance-enhancing drugs and Bud Selig is nuts when he talks about "eradicating" drugs from the game. The Olympic sports are still rife with drugs, and they have the supposed "gold standard" of testing. Sure, ballplayers are using growth hormone, and some even are using sophisticated masking agents or drugs to avoid detection. But those numbers have gone way down from the Wild West days of the previous 15 years. I am by no means naive about this, but the climate has changed. I still look at some players and wonder, but I don't begin with the assumption that because a player is great he must be juicing. I don't think it's literally a post-steroids era, but it is a different era. Call it the Steroid Testing Era, where at least there is some gatekeeping going on.

As for the news-gathering side of your question, beat writers don't stay away from the story because they need people to talk to them. They stay away from it because they are beat writers, not investigative journalists. Do you have any idea how hard it is to investigate and write definitively with first-hand sourcing that a player is engaged in illegal, clandestine, off-the-field drug use -- and, oh, by the way, you are covering Major League Baseball at the same time? Give credit to the San Francisco Chronicle for taking two investigative reporters, not baseball writers, and putting them on the BALCO story for more than two years. And really, a paper and source trail created by a federal investigation formed the groundwork of those stories. Newspapers and magazines should have people dedicated to drugs in sports, given the Lance Armstrong investigation, BALCO, the Carolina Panthers scandal, etc., and because drugs have become so sophisticated and available that they will continue to be a large part of sports.

I can tell you I have asked (and routinely still do ask) many players face-to-face about using steroids -- Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Jason Giambi among them. You can imagine their answers. But I've also gotten more newsworthy answers to the same questions from Ken Caminiti and Gary Sheffield. I don't turn a blind eye to it.