BOMBERS IN LAP OF LUXURY

Again aren’t too taxed to add star power

So much for the $189 million luxury-tax threshold rebate. But then, we knew that. The Yankees did what they had to do in signing Japanese pitching prodigy Masahiro Tanaka for seven years and $155 million — luxury-tax threshold be damned — because even after spending $283 million already this winter on Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran, they knew they still didn’t have a team that was going to rejuvenate their fan base with dreams of October.

Now they do, even if it is presently all illusory since nobody knows for sure how Tanaka’s numbers (24-0, 1.27 ERA) in Japan’s Pacific League last season will translate in the major leagues, or whether a pitcher who has never thrown a pitch in the majors will actually perform like a $22-million-per-year ace.

It doesn’t matter — at least right now, in the cold of late January. All the Yankees knew was that CC Sabathia, one of the most hittable pitchers in baseball last year, with a career high extra-base hit percentage and a league-leading 112 earned runs, was hardly the equivalent of the $23 million ace he was paid to be, and that 38-year-old Hiroki Kuroda, who was their No. 1 starter for three-fourths of the season, was 0-7 with a 6.56 ERA in his last seven starts before being shut down.

“We did this because we want to win,” Yankees co-owner Hank Steinbrenner said by phone from Tampa on Wednesday. “We’ll continue to do what we have to do, regardless of the sacrifice.”

By sacrifice, Steinbrenner was talking about the Yankees’ luxurytax bill which, at $29.1 million, was the highest in baseball last year and will again approach that now in 2014.

But make no mistake, the numbers the Steinbrenners are most focused on this winter are not the $189 million luxury-tax threshold or even the major-league high $97 million revenuesharing bill the Yankees had. Rather, they are the sagging YES Network television ratings and the new Yankee Stadium attendance figures, which have been steadily declining from 3.76 million in 2010 to 3.27 million last year, their lowest since 2001.

That’s a half million missing patrons, the product of a deteriorating team and a bankrupt player development department that has failed to produce any position players or pitchers to replace the abilities and appeal of Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, or soon, Derek Jeter.

Even though the Yankees somehow managed to stay in contention for much of last season despite their myriad of injuries, their fans clearly are losing interest in this team as, one by one, the homegrown nucleus largely responsible for those five world championships from 1996-2009 has left the scene.

As one baseball official observed: “The Yankees were desperate. They knew they didn’t have enough pitching and they’ve gotten themselves in a box because there’s nothing in their farm system, and there were no starters on the free-agent market who could make a difference for them.”

Steinbrenner so much as conceded that.

“I’m really happy with all the guys we’ve added this winter,” he said. “We’ve added four of the five top rated free agents, three really tough players in McCann, Ellsbury and now Tanaka, and while Beltran is more laid-back, he’s a proven clutch hitter. I really like our lineup now, but even with McCann, Ellsbury and Beltran, we knew we needed more pitching. We don’t know for sure what Tanaka will do over here, but what we do know is he’s a tough competitor, who wanted to be a Yankee, and has the Reggie factor of wanting to be in the big games.

“People forget he’s used to pitching where an entire country is hanging on his every pitch, where the media attention over there is even bigger than New York.”

This is the kind of hype we can expect from the Yankees for the next couple of months because, first and foremost, the signing of Tanaka is about selling tickets, reinvigorating their fans and, if nothing else, creating the illusion that this one pitcher, the most coveted of all free agents this winter even though he’s never pitched in the majors, can transform the Bombers into legitimate World Series contenders.

Rather than dwell on his excessive workload in Japan (1,315 innings, including a combined 359 in his first two seasons, 2007 and ’08), the Yankees point to his age (25), his makeup and the scouting reports that indicate he has all the necessities to be a topof-the-rotation pitcher in the major leagues as well.

“We believe in this player’s talent,” general manager Brian Cashman said Wednesday. “It might be overkill, but we’d rather have gone all out than leave ourselves a little short on a player we really wanted.”

Said Steinbrenner: “I’ve heard all the media criticizing my brother and me for not spending ‘the way George would spend.’ My father didn’t have to deal with revenue sharing the way we do.”

Actually, he did. George Steinbrenner was very much alive and well when revenue sharing was introduced into baseball in 1996. The competitive-balance luxury tax was the key element of the 2003 labor agreement. The difference was, George Steinbrenner didn’t care how much he spent, didn’t care what his taxes were, whereas Yankees managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner has tried to run a more prudent Yankee business.

It was prudence on his part not to give Robinson Cano $300 million.

Because of the failures of his player development department, however, Hal had to throw all prudence out the window when it came to landing Tanaka and putting an exclamation point on the Yankees’ winter remake. It doesn’t matter if, for the moment, this might be illusory. With the Super Bowl coming to town, the Yankees are once again the biggest story in New York and once again the center of the baseball universe.

The Boss would be proud.