When it’s time to reboot

The Final Four in baseball this year is Orioles, Royals, Cardinals, Giants. Right now, because of the way they begin the playoffs, the big story is the Royals, who haven’t been in the playoffs since 1985. They were a very bad team for a very long time but finally built a farm system, made trades like the one they made for Big Game James Shields and Wade Davis, and here they are, lighting it up.

So that is one way to do it, the hard way. Very hard. A better way is the Cardinals, who have become the model organization of the sport without buying their way here. They are now in the NLCS for the fourth consecutive year, have won two World Series over the past decade, lost two others to Boston. The Giants, who don’t buy their way to October, are looking to win a third World Series in five years.

The Yankees, with general manager Brian Cashman getting a new three-year contract, basically say they aren’t going to change. It means they are going to keep spending like drunks. They have spent about $3 billion to win one World Series since 2000. But we still talk about them like it’s the ’90s, and they are just a couple of moves away. They’re not.

Cashman said the other day that they’re always in a “win now mode.” And that is an admirable position to take, and a good thing to sell to his fan base. But win what? CC Sabathia said not long ago that players want to play for the Yankees because they have a chance to win the World Series every year. Actually, they don’t. Over the past decade, the Yankees are far more likely to either lose in the first round of the playoffs or not make the playoffs than they are to win the Series, something they last did five years ago when they spent money and microwaved a team the way they tried to microwave one this season.

The Red Sox have spent money, you bet, over the past 10 years. But they have won the Series three times and when they did it again last season, they did it with guys like Mike Napoli and Jonny Gomes and Shane Victorino and Koji Uehara and David Ross. If you see a $100 million contract in there, a real bad contract in the name of a quick fix, raise a hand.

The Yankees see what Sabathia looks like in his middle 30s, at the back end of his contract — one the Yankees even extended — and may be about to sign Max Scherzer or Jon Lester or Big Game James to the same kind of contract. What kind of player is Jacoby Ellsbury, even after a pretty good season in his first season at Yankee Stadium, going to be by the fifth year of his seven-year, $150 million contract?

And how did Mark Teixeira work out for them?

They can talk about injuries all they want, and maybe they could have found enough runs to make it to October if Carlos Beltran had been healthier, or Teixeira. They can also say that Beltran’s elbow wasn’t an old-man injury. But the idea that you can have all these geezers around and not expect them to get hurt is thinking as flawed as their win-now mission statement has become.

This week they fired their hitting coach, Kevin Long, to make it look as if there is real accountability in the franchise. And finally, finally, they are going to make a change at the head of their farm system, after not developing a star position player since Cano and no star starting pitcher, really, since Andy Pettitte. Hal Steinbrenner goes through the half-hearted motion of talking like a tough Steinbrenner owner, like he’s learning a new language on Rosetta Stone. But one of the reasons that Brian is coming back is that even if Steinbrenner had wanted to hire a new general manager, he wouldn’t have had a clue about who it should be. All we know for sure is that he’s decided that the general manager he has is indispensable.

In fairness to Cashman? He did go out and hire the best bats available in the last offseason, and got the one pitcher — Masahiro Tanaka — he had to have, the way he had to have Sabathia once. Then Tanaka had a partial tear of the ligament in his pitching elbow. He made two starts at the end of the regular season and we’re to believe, despite the way he looked, especially throwing the splitters he threw, that he is cured. Sure he is.

Two straight years out of the playoffs, the first time that has happened in 20 years, despite the outlay of nearly half-a-billion in new contracts in the past offseason. In 2012, they got swept in the ALCS by the Tigers, only got past the Orioles in the first round because Sabathia had broken Nick Markakis’ hand at the end of the regular season. The year before that? They lost Game 5 of the first round to the Tigers at home.

The best thing for the Yankees would be for Cashman to go outside the organization for somebody to run his farm system, and to go outside his organization for some different voices regarding player personnel, different sets of eyes. People who are going to challenge the general manager, instead of acting as bobblehead dolls. Maybe they should go try to hire somebody from the Cardinals. Or the Giants.

Somehow the Yankees continue to perpetuate the Bronx tale that they are right there, every year, a couple of players away. They’re not. And please tell me which one, out of the players they have under contract, is the one you want to pay big money to watch next season.

Now there’s the idea that they might need a bust-out case like Alex Rodriguez to come back and sell tickets for them. It is pathetic. You want to know where the Yankees are? That’s where. The guy first showed up at the Stadium 10 years ago, and has made more Yankee money than anybody has since. How has THAT worked out for everybody?