ESPN.com: MLB – Yankees get OF help, deal for Jays’ Mondesi

I don’t normally post about non-Braves matters here; I did it on my old site sporadically, but this is Braves Journal after all. I intend to eventually set up a subdomain for non-Braves writings but I haven’t. But I wanted to comment on the Yankees’ Mondesi acquisition.

This is great news. Mondesi won’t actually hurt the Yankees — at least, I don’t think he will — but he won’t help them much either. And money is really no object in New York. They can have a $200 million roster if they needed. And he didn’t cost much of anything in terms of talent, because the Jays were just happy to get rid of him.

It is still great news, because it is the strongest evidence yet that George Steinbrenner is once again interfering in the day-to-day operations of the club, and that the “throw money at the problem” mindset that dominated the organization in the eighties and early nineties has returned. The Yankees won a bunch of games in the eighties, more than any team, but they never won it all, and didn’t even make postseason after 1981. In those years they signed a bunch of free agents but had no real plan. If those days are back, the Yankees are no threat.