Meet the East: New York

2008 record: 89-73, 8 games back.
(Would have won the American League Central, for what it's worth.)

Highlights:
* Mike Mussina won 20 games before he retired.
* Jason Giambi hit 32 home runs before he was replaced by Mark Teixeira.
* Alex Rodriguez hit 35 home runs and drove in 103 runs before, well, you know.
* Joba Chamberlain had a 2.31 ERA in 30 games as a reliever -- and then went 3-1 with a 2.76 ERA in 12 starts.

Lowlights:
* Jorge Posada played in just 51 games, forcing Jose Molina (whose slugging percentage of .313 was lower than the batting average of Cristian Guzman) behind the plate full-time.
* Robinson Cano, who hit .342 two seasons ago, hit just .271 and OBP'ed .305, both his worst numbers as a big-leaguer.
* Phil Hughes (6.62 ERA in eight starts) and Ian Kennedy (8.35 ERA in nine starts) both were disasters.

Storyline:
The Yankees face the same question with Hughes and Kennedy that the Red Sox do with Clay Buchholz: How much of last season can be chalked up to not being ready, and how much can be chalked up to not being good enough?

The signings of CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett do give the Yankees some breathing room. With Chien-Ming Wang primed for a bounche-back year and Chamberlain looking like the Lester to Hughes' Buchholz, there's no urgency for the Yankees to do any more with their youngsters than send them back to Scranton-Wilkes Barre ("the absolute worst place on Earth!") and give them another year to work out the kinks.

Yankee fans, though, still have to wonder the same thing about Hughes and Kennedy that many Red Sox fans wonder about Buchholz: Are they ever going to make it? Or does a disastrous debut mean they're never going to be the impact pitchers fans have envisioned them as being?

Some pitchers make a huge impact right off the bat. Arizona's Brandon Webb won 10 games with a 2.84 ERA in his first full season in 2003; Florida's Dontrelle Willis electrified the major leagues in his rookie season that same year. Houston's Roy Oswalt struck out 130 and walked just 17 as a 23-year-old in 2001. Curt Schilling, after two seasons pitching exclusively out of the bullpen, had a 2.35 ERA and struck out 147 in his first season as a full-time starter in 1992.

Others, though, don't start off so hot. Here's a sampling drawn from the ranks of Cy Young vote-getters over the past three seasons:

* Roy Halladay, 1999, age 22: 3.97 ERA in 18 starts
Halladay endured an even worse sophomore season in 2000, compiling an ERA of 10.64 and finding himself shipped back to Triple-A Syracuse first in May and again at the end of July. He didn't make it back for good until 2001 but went 19-7 with a 2.93 ERA in 2002. He won the Cy Young Award in 2003 and has finished in the top five of the voting three times since.

* Chris Carpenter, 1997, age 22: 5.02 ERA in 13 starts
Carpenter never really put it together in six seasons in Toronto, the team that drafted him No. 15 overall in the 1993 draft. His best season with the Blue Jays was probably 2001, when he was 26, when he went 11-11 and finished with a 4.09 ERA. But it wasn't until he missed a full season with a torn labrum and got a chance of scenery that he blossomed into one of the big leagues' best. He compiled a 21-5 record with a 2.83 ERA and a 213-51 strikeout-to-walk ratio en route to the Cy Young Award in 2005.

* Bartolo Colon, 1997, age 24: 5.76 ERA in 17 starts
Colon gave up six runs and didn't get out of the first inning in his second big-league start; he gave up at least four earned runs in more than half of his starts. By the end of the season, he'd been bumped to the bullpen -- and he was left off the postseason roster for an Indians team that came within two outs of winning the World Series. A year later, though, Colon cut his ERA to 3.71 and threw six complete games; he then threw a four-hitter he threw against the Yankees in Game 3 of the ALCS.

The lesson here? You can't ever tell right away.

Some ripped the Yankees for abandoning their youth movement with the signings of Sabathia and Burnett this offseason. As is the case with Buchholz, there's almost no chance for Hughes or Kennedy to pitch their way into the starting rotation this spring. But the two remain highly touted prospects -- Kennedy just turned 24, and Hughes won't turn 23 until this summer. Both had a rough start, but both might prove to be late bloomers along the lines of Halladay, Carpenter and Colon. The chance to develop slowly might turn out to be the best thing for them.

On the horizon:
The Yankees will have to make a decision in the next year or so about what to do with Derek Jeter. The consummate Yankee -- and, like it or not, probably the best-known player in the major leagues -- is in the second-to-last season of a 10-year contract he signed in 2001. He'll make $20 million this season and $21 million next season. After that, though, he'll be 36 going on 37 and even farther along the downhill path he's been on for the last three seasons.

Some numbers for you:
2006, age 32: .343 batting, .417 on-base, .483 slugging
2007, age 33: .322 batting, .388 on-base, .452 slugging
2006, age 34: .300 batting, .363 on-base, .408 slugging

And that's not even addressing the issue of his defense, which ranks dead last among shortstops (according to the Fielding Bible's plus-minus stats) over the last three seasons.

The Yankees can't afford to let Jeter walk; Jeter, too, knows he'll never be worshipped elsewhere the way he is in New York. But he's just not an elite player anymore.

Even Jeter's pursuit of Pete Rose's all-time hits record seems overblown. He he finished last season with 2,535 career hits -- 1,721 shy of Rose's record. He'd need to average 215 hits a season over the next eight seasons or 191 hits a season over the next nine seasons; either way, he'd have to stay productive well past his 40th birthday. At the rate his numbers are declining -- he only had 179 hits last season -- it's barely worth discussing unless things start trending back the other way.