Yankees are paying price for refusing to play hardball

	The Yankees erred in allowing Daisuke Matsuzaka to go to Boston while signing Kei Igawa instead. Jim Rogash/WireImage.com

Hindsight being as eagle-eyed as it is, it's easy to see just where the present-day Yankees went wrong. They tried to restock their farm system and compete at the big league level at the same time. They pulled away from what they do best -- nobody bullies people in baseball with a checkbook quite like the guys in the pinstriped front office, whether it's in the free-agent market or at the trade table -- and that's costing them now.

Face it: These Yankees are dead meat. They might not be completely done, at 14½ games out of first place in the AL East and 8½ behind the wild-card leader with June 1 peeking around the corner. But if I'm looking for medium-well done, this thing already is too far gone. I'm sending it back.

Let's look, with some of that unerring hindsight, at just some of the ways that the Yankees have burned this baby:

1) They counted on Carl Pavano. OK, so this one's a gimme. It's so painfully obvious that even the Yankees are admitting it.

When it comes to pitching, you can point to a lot of missteps by the Yankees' front office in the past few years (Jeff Weaver, anyone?). But it's hard to remember an instance in which the team was planning on so much from a single pitcher with so little justification for that faith. This guy had one good year, in 2004 for the Florida Marlins. One. No way should the Yanks have gone into this season figuring Pavano would be part of the rotation.

Sure, they had laid out for that $40 million contract, and so it probably wasn't too much to ask for a little return on their money. But since when does spending money guarantee results? Weaver proved that. Jaret Wright, too. Randy Johnson. Kevin Brown. Steve Karsay. Denny Neagle. I could go on.

2) They underestimated the importance of getting Daisuke Matsuzaka. You bid $32 million for the right to talk to Matsuzaka, the phenomenal right-hander from Japan, and you figure you're doing plenty. As it turned out, the Yanks, in their new conservatism, badly miscalculated. Their offer was nearly $20 million less than Boston's. And the decision to go low is killing them.

Matsuzaka is exactly what the Yankees need: a solid starter who can pitch deep into games, giving his team a chance to win while allowing the bullpen to rest. Unfortunately for the New Yorkers he's doing it for the team that they're trying to catch, leaving the Yanks to rely on overpaid flops Pavano and Kei Igawa and kids such as Chase Wright and Matt DeSalvo.

3) They blew it on Igawa, who wasn't going to be a star anyway. At best Igawa slotted in at the back end of the rotation. But after losing out on Matsuzaka the Yanks went for the fallback, spending more than $46 million over the next five years for a guy who so far has allowed more than 1½ baserunners per inning and has a 7.46 ERA. He's currently trying to get his mechanics straightened out in the minor leagues.