And while I’m not following it all that closely yet one thing is conspicuously absent this spring: Things are awfully quiet with the New York Yankees.

This year around this time news of Alex Rodriguez’ past positive steroid test came to light.

Around that time there was also news of the hip injury that cost A-Rod’s the first month of his season, though it also got him out of the spotlight for awhile.

There was a constant buzz through the offseason about how Joe Girardi would do replacing Joe Torre as manager.

Throughout the offseason there was plenty of coverage of the Yankees’ maneuverings through free agency, which amounted to about a half-billion in guaranteed salaries for CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira during a time when most other teams in the league were pinching pennies.

And the media firestorm carried into the season as the team opened its new ballpark – to a lot of empty seats due to high prices and the nation’s economic struggles.

I guess such a media frenzy is to be expected in the Big Apple. The business-like bunch buckled down, stayed focused and broke a decade-long World Series drought, beating the Phillies in November.

So what would happen if the team had nothing to focus on all spring except playing baseball? With a few minor exceptions (A-Rod and Cameron Diaz now?) it looks like we’re about to find out. The most conspicuous stories from Yankees camp so far seems to be the lack of conspicuous stories so far.

Brian Cashman, according to MLB.com, appears hesitant to talk about just how quiet it’s been, perhaps out of fear that by acknowledging it he’ll stir something up. but so far it’s awfully, awfully quiet.

Sure, there’s debate about whether Joba Chamberlain should be a starter or a reliever.

There are position battles. Brett Gardner and Randy Winn are fighting for playing time in the outfield and nobody knows for sure yet who the team’s fifth starter will be, though behind the combination of Sabathia, Burnett, Javier Vazquez and Andy Pettitte it’s not like it matters a lot.

And there is curiosity about how and where Curtis Granderson and Nick Johnson will fit into the lineup.

But those are baseball questions. They don’t involve performance enhancing drugs or finances or ticket sales or any of the other spectacles that have surrounded this team off and on over recent years.

This intrigues me a little bit. Look at how dominant this manufactured (and heavily store bought) machine was in fighting through distractions last year. With a full month-and-change to focus on nothing but preparing for the baseball season do the Yankees gel and become even more powerful than they have been?

Or is the publicity and controversy rising up in the tabloids and giving the Yankees reason to rise up in an “us against the world” mentality part of what feeds the Bronx Bombers?

If it is, this spring could be a good thing for the rest of Major League Baseball. Because right now it’s just too quiet.

A few days ago I was thinking of writing a post praising the Minnesota Twins for being aggressive and filling nearly every hole in the team’s lineup heading into year one at Target Field.

I never quite got around to that post. And Tuesday morning the Twins’ fortunes took a dramatic turn for the worse when the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that closer Joe Nathan is likely out for the year with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow.

In addition to the new ballpark, the offseason acquisitions of Orlando Hudson, Jim Thome, JJ Hardy and the Winter League performance of Francisco Liriano had enthusiasm higher than I ever recall it heading into Spring Training. The mood on Minneapolis sports talk radio  is decidedly more sanguine this morning. The Nathan injury is huge. He had some struggles at the end of the 2009 season but his numbers still put him well among the league’s elite closers.

Inside the organization the Twins did some work to solidify the bullpen late last season and during the offseason. Guys like Jon Rauch (from Arizona) and Clay Condrey (from Philadelphia) join holdovers Matt Guerrier, Jesse Crain, Jose Mijares, and Pat Neshek, who is returning from arm problems of his own, give the team the deepest mid-innings relief corps it’s had in years.

But as a closer Rauch has been middling at best. Guerrier has done a great job as a setup man for most of the past few seasons but his stuff doesn’t lend itself to closing. Crain, well, I almost forgot to include him on this list, if that says anything. And Neshek has long been talked about as Nathan’s heir apparent, but he hasn’t thrown an inning that mattered since May 8, 2008.

On the farm the Twins have Anthony Slama and Rob Delaney, but by most accounts they’re not ready to pitch in the Major Leagues, much less close. And does a team heading into the season with aspirations of making a deep run into the playoffs want a rookie in that role anyway?

One caller to KFAN’s mid-morning show mentioned the possibility of signing John Smoltz. He is available, though Yahoo! Sports just this morning published a report indicating that he and Pedro Martinez are both likely to sign mid-season deals with National League teams to continue their careers.

There’s also some talk about the possibility of putting Francisco Liriano in the closer role if Brian Duensing or Glen Perkins can fill the fifth starter spot. I guess it’s an option. But if Liriano is really pitching as well as the winter reports indicate he stands the best chance the Twins have of putting a true ace on the mound every fifth day. I would rather see him head the rotation than close.

There will probably be some guys that come available as teams fall out of the pennant race toward mid-season deadlines. But finding closers is difficult and they don’t come on the market very often. And there isn’t a team out there that is going to trade someone to Minnesota just out of sympathy. If anything the price in prospects probably just went up dramatically.

So, out of the gate, my best guess is that Mijares, Neshek and Guerrier start the season pitching the 7th and 8th innings in a setup role with Rauch becoming the closer. And if the team is doing well – as it still should – I’m guessing they’ll take a look at his performance and the available market and see if they are willing to swallow hard and cough up what it would take to bring in a top-notch closer with a bit more experience in the role.

But this is one of the toughest breaks this team has suffered in a long time.

General manager Neal Huntington furthered the ridicule he and the rest of the Pirates organization should receive by blaming the media for the move.

Yes, in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette Sunday, Huntington is quoted saying all trade talks for Capps dried up after the paper reported the week before that there was a possibility the team could non-tender Capps.

Sorry Mr. Huntington. That excuse is pathetic. Every team gets media scrutiny during the winter meetings and throughout the season, most probably more than the Pirates. Making your decisions based on a couple paragraphs in the local newspaper is short-sighted and dumb.

Among his other lines, according to the story: “It’s not that hard to replace a reliever with an ERA of 5.00 or 6.00.”

Do you think some injuries might have had something to do with his struggles last season? Did he warrant a contract somewhere between what he would have gotten on the open market and what the cheap Pirates organization was likely unwilling to pay?

The fact of the matter is this: The Pirates have been pathetic for two decades. They have never been more pathetic and aimless than they are right now. And a blind person throwing darts could have made the personnel moves you have the last two seasons and not missed at as high a percentage.

Pirates fans should be livid by how this organization has been run in recent years. But the sad simple fact of the matter is they are probably too bored or resigned at this point to care.

What a putrid joke.

Those teams often overlap with other teams that can’t compete because their ballparks simply don’t produce enough revenue to keep up with the Red Sox and the Yankees, who just successfully bought their latest World Series championship.

Finally, there are teams who might fall into either of the previous categories but who really can only blame their own organizational and management ineptitude.

The Pittsburgh Pirates, as we’ve written before and will write again, have once again fallen into that category. The fans in the Steel City have had little reason for nearly two decades to maintain any optimism about this team, despite ponying up a few years ago to build one of the nicest new ballparks in the country.

Two years ago the Pirates were coming off one of the few promising seasons they’d had – they still posted a losing record but they had several young players at key positions entering 2008. By the All-Star Break in 2009 they had traded or otherwise gotten rid of seven of eight position players and several members of the pitching staff as well.

The 2009 season included trading Nate McLouth for prospects among other transactions that moved players around but did little to show the organization actually has a plan for getting better in the long term.

The Pirates’ latest blunder was non-tendering Matt Capps. Capps is coming off a bad, injury-riddled season no question. But for the three seasons before that Capps put up good-to-great numbers as both a setup man and closer. As he heads into his arbitration years he deserved better from the organization than this sudden boot. And the fans continue to deserve better than an organization that seems unwilling to pay anybody to get into their money years with the team.

I have a friend that grew up in the 1970s who is a huge Pirates fan going back to the days of Willie Stargell and Roberto Clemente. He speculates that the Pirates didn’t want to run the risk that Capps could make $5 million or so in salary. Instead, he thinks, the organization hopes to re-sign the reliever to a contract more along the lines of $2 million.

Good luck with that.

Capps, when healthy, is a proven closer and even if a team doesn’t want to gamble on his health as a 9th inning pitcher he’s put up numbers that will no doubt result in some team offering more than $2 million for him to take a setup role.

If the Pirates thought $5 million – or whatever relative pittance he would have received – was too much, they should have signed him anyway and then put him on the trade block after the All-Star break. This asinine maneuver most likely prevents the Pirates from  getting anything back for someone who, I believe, would have proven to be among their more movable chips at the trade deadline.

But that’s how it goes when you are the Pittsburgh Pirates. They’re the equivalent of the Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals of the 1990s in the NFL or the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA. It’s a shame – Pittsburgh is a proud city and a great sports town. But the Pirates are a joke – an organization in shambles. And moves such as this prove once again that there is no long-term plan in place at all.

Sorry Pirates fans. At least you have football and hockey to be excited about.

Rodriguez is 0-8 with six strikeouts against Philadelphia so far.

His lack of contribution in game one helped the Phillies steal the first game. Luckily for him – and Yankes fans, starved for a winner after a whole decade without a World Series championship – three high-priced Bronx Bomber free agent acquisitions from this year and years past helped the Yanks salvage game two.

Matsui, a Yankee since signing a $21 million, three-year contract in 2001, led the team with a 2-3 night that included a home run and a walk.

Two of this year’s $423.5 million trio of free agents also came up big tonight. Mark Teixeira, who signed an eight-year, $180 million contract back in December, also homered.

A.J. Burnett, who signed a five-year, $82.5 million contract a few days after Teixeira (paltry by Yankees standards, probably because of the injury risk he carries), threw seven strong innings. He gave up just one run and struck out nine.

Those performances loomed large tonight after the highest of the high-paid free agents, CC Sabathia (seven years, $160 million – how do you think Burnett feels about that after tonight), pitched seven strong innings but was bested by Cliff Lee on Wednesday night.

For the record, players the Yankees actually developed (Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano, Brett Gardner, Melky Cabrera and Jorge Posada – or just under half of the 11 position players who played tonight) went a combined 4-13 with one run and one RBI. Mariano Rivera pitched two innings for the save.

(Johnny Damon, who the Yanks lured away from the rival Red Sox for a $52 million, four-year deal in 2005, went 0-4.)

So the high-buck Yankees salvaged the split as the series heads to Philadelphia where the slightly less high-salaried Phillies will host the next three games starting Saturday.

Can’t hardly wait.

$423.5 million and three of the top free agents on the market last offseason later they’re back in the World Series.

Congratulations, Yankees. You opened your pocketbooks to the point where it would have been almost impossible for you to screw it up. And I’m guessing you’ll win the Fall “Classic” in five games at most.

Parity?

Ha!

But a woman who sued the Philadelphia Phillies when the team played a switcheroo on her 12-year-old daughter after the girl caught Ryan Howard’s 200th homerun ball …

Well, I think it’s too bad it got to the point where the family took legal action, but shame on the Phillies and on Howard for taking advantage of a naive kid to get the slugger his souvenir ball.

According to CNN, after the girl caught the ball a Florida Marlins representative took her to the Phillies’ clubhouse where a Philadelphia rep told the child and her brother that if she left the ball she could have Howard sign it. When she returned with her grandfather after the game, the team provided her with a ball signed by Howard, but not the original ball.

First off, it’s commonplace for fans to trade landmark balls back to players for different merchandise. Otherwise the fans have the option of taking the balls onto the open market. According to the CNN story, the Howard ball might have been worth a couple thousand dollars at most.

But quotes in the story make it sound like the girl, Jennifer Valdivia, wanted the ball more for sentimental reasons. And that also is her right.

So, again, shame on the Phillies for taking advantage of the girl and her family by playing the switcheroo. Shame on Howard for not meeting with her to sign the ball – or offer her some alternative such as a game-used bat or another ball signed by Howard. He had the chance to create a fan for life – and possibly get his ball back in the process.

But instead Howard and the team played the role of bully. And so yes, I am glad the family got a lawyer and filed suit. When notified that the girl and her lawyer were seeking the ball and compensation in excess of $15,000 Valdivia got her ball back.

Chalk one up for the little gal in this case. And thank you Phillies for making my rooting interest in your playoff series easy. Go Rockies.

It’s bad enough that during Sports Center–the show that made its claim to fame by showing highlight after highlight of virtually all of the previous day’s sporting events–from the big game to the largely irrelevant ones–was repeatedly pimping their story on the history of the Pie to the Face in Major League Baseball.

Truly ground breaking sports journalism there.

But on top of that, they once again managed to put their ESPyaNkees slant on things–in the story preview sidebar, they managed to squeeze in a headline as a lead in to the story, entitled “Yankees Walkoffs.”

That’s right, they took a stupid story, and put the Yankees spin on it, because apparently Yankees starting pitcher AJ Burnett has pied several players in the face this season after walkoff wins, including Melky Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon, and some rookie catcher that was a September call-up (Francisco Cervelli maybe?  I was so enthralled by the thought, time and effort put into the piece that I missed the name).

Glad I can once again go six months without checking out Sports Center…

His reward? Florida Marlins officials reportedly talked with Howard Johnson about a position with the organization and rumors are spreading that Gonzalez may be fired.

Owner Jeffrey Loria, a frequent target of Brushbackpitch.com for being the cheapest owner in Major League Baseball, actually believes this team underachieved, according to SportsIllustrated.com’s Jon Heyman.

“We don’t talk about rumors; we never have,” team President David Samson reportedly told reporters after the game, according to a story at the team’s MLB.com site. “The answer is after every season we always evaluate everyone, so that is normal. We’re all disappointed. Certainly, winning 87 or 88 games is a positive for the organization, but our goal every year is to make the playoffs. That’s that. Rumors come out all the time this time of year about all sorts of things. From our perspective, there is nothing different about this year than the 10 others I’ve had in baseball.”

The team’s goal might be making the playoffs. But when you’ve go into the season expecting to have a centerfielder competing for rookie of the year (Cameron Maybin) and he flops mightily; when you have a leadoff hitter start the season with 14 hits, a homer, and nine runs in the season’s first five games only to see him finish with a .269 average and a .306 on-base percentage (Emilio Bonifacio); when Jeremy Hermida gets 429 at-bats when he has proven to be a part-time player; and most importantly when team ownership, year after year after year, trades almost anyone approaching arbitration (see previous BBP posts on the team trading Scott Olsen, Josh Willingham, Mike Jacobs, Kevin Gregg, et al) – yes, when all of these things happen before and during one season, team ownership should be thrilled with 87 wins.

But no. Loria wants to spend south of $40 million on player contracts, despite receiving nearly two-thirds of that amount in revenue sharing alone and he wants his manager to take a team full of rookies and Major League misfits to the playoffs.

Is Howard Johnson going to win more than 87 games with this bunch?

Then again, Loria has a history of this kind of move. After an 11-31 start in 2006, Joe Girardi led the Marlins back into the outer realm of the Wild Card hunt before the team finished 78-84 with the youngest and, yes, once again lowest paid team in the league.

Girardi was named manager of the year that year. But he reportedly didn’t get along with Loria, so the owner canned him. How did that turn out?

Well, put Girardi on the highest-paid team this season and he led the Yankees to a 103 win season. Now, granted, ownership bought him a pretty nice hand to play during the offseason. But Girardi, nonetheless, is a skilled manager.

Fredi Gonzalez appears to be a skilled manager as well. He overachieved with this collection of talent. If this group is kept together (yeah, right) there are plenty of young guns that could develop into the playoff team Loria wants to see. But if Gonzalez pays the price for only winning 87 games this year by losing his job it will be the biggest screw job since who knows when.

But it looks like there’s a good chance that Gonzalez will follow Girardi out the door.

Loria, look in the mirror. The person you should be firing is yourself.

In reality, while Jeter has had a fantastic season, he’s nowhere near the best MVP candidate for 2009. Look at the work Joe Mauer, Miguel Cabrera and others have done compared with Jeter and that’s obvious. Then take a look at Jeter’s teammate, Mark Teixeira, and hopefully it’s clear to most impartial observers that Jeter, while a valuable player and by almost all accounts a decent guy, isn’t even the most credible candidate on his own team.

Really what it most proved was that the Wall Street Journal should stick to business reporting. In past years it would have been a perfect target for a Fire Joe Morgan deconstruction, but unfortunately that Web site has shut down. A friend and former colleague at the Star Tribune took a credible FJM shot at the WSJ’s performance on his Randball blog.

While his work was solid the masters were at the helm as guest editors of Deadspin for a day. And they came through, brilliantly exposing the holes in the Journal’s argument. Read and enjoy …

Then let’s have some debate. Who is the AL MVP for 2009? In the NL it would appear to me as though Albert Pujols is the clear-cut winner. But there are a handful of legit candidates in the AL. Who would y’all vote for?

My vote? As a local, it’d be nice to see Joe Mauer win. He’s had a fantastic season. But facts are facts and I believe winning plays a role in how “valuable” you are to your team. And the Twins were roughly .500 without him the first month of the season and they’ve been roughly a .500 team with him. Taking homerism out, I’d probably choose Cabrera. The Tigers will likely win the AL Central. And while they aren’t without flaws, without Cabrera that team probably finishes in third place.