I have to admit, I’m one of those Mets fans who takes great pleasure in seeing the Yankees fail. It’s not that I’d rather see the Yankees lose than the Mets win. It’s just that the Mets seem to lose so often (and in such mind-numbing ways) that come October, there is little left for a National League-oriented New Yorker to do but hope someone can beat the Yankees in the most heart-breaking way possible.

Does that make me a terrible person? I don’t know.

But it does make me a terribly happy person.

Because, of course, yesterday marks the first day in 14 years (that’s more than 2/3 of my life!) that the New York Yankees have been eliminated from playoff contention. Not only does this call for days of endless celebration across all of New England (as well as isolated sections of the New York area), but it means that we get to hear from Buster Olney, author of thousands of articles on the collapse of the Yankee Dynasty and on how Derek Jeter is great. As you can tell, I like him.

Actually, Olney’s article pleasantly surprised me. I thought we were going to hear a lot about Jason Giambi, A-Rod, and Carl Pavano. You know: how the Yankees got away from the clutch-proven winner-Paul O’Neill types, and instead relied too much on player who “don’t know how to play in October.” Instead, Olney actually gave a solid, and well evidenced, argument for the fall of the Yankee powerhouse– poor drafts. (If you have the time, check it out– interesting numbers for evaluating GM’s.)

Now, unusually, I don’t disagree with Olney. The Yankees have not, until recently, drafted well, or placed a lot of emphasis on drafting. They have not been built on youth and on players from their farm system, but on spending a lot of money, and trading for great players. This much is not really up for debate.

But I do take issue with the assumption that those late 1990’s teams were. Or, by extention, that the Yankees in the 2000’s have failed because they were not focused enough on youth. 

As everyone is quick to point out, the best position players on the ‘dynasty’ team were homegrown. Lifetime Yank Bernie Williams consistently had the highest OPS+ on the team, Jeter and Posada were excellent players in their prime, and I suppose Andy Pettite was an ‘ace.’ Let’s not confuse matters, however: this was hardly the Oakland Athletics. Most of this team, and the parts that really made the 1998 team better than their 2000 counterparts, were acquired players: Tino Martinez, Chuck Knoblauch, Scott Brosius, Darryl Strawberry, Paul O’Neill, David Cone, David Wells, and El Duque. Never mind everyone except Mo in the bullpen. According to baseball-reference.com, that Yankees time, the second greatest of all time, perhaps, had only 6, maybe 7 homegrown players, and that’s only if you include El Duque and HIdeki Irabu, who were hardly products of the Yankee farm system. It’s not as if the Yanks were a small market team built on good young players. This was a team with a good Yankee (TM) core, and lots of important supplementary free-agent types.

This year, the Yanks used upwards of 10 young, homegrown players, including well known stars like Robinson Cano and Joba Chamberlin. The problem here isn’t quite that they didn’t have the young, farm talent (which for the better part of the decade, Olney is correct, they didn’t have). It’s that the young stars they did have either got hurt, or underperformed, or both. That’s why the Yanks stunk this year. Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy stunk so badly that they undermined a very nice (and quiet) year from Mike Mussina. Melky Cabrera, Cano, and whoever was catching were such huge holes in the lineup that they dragged down what could have been an impressive offense. In reality, the best part about this team was its free-agent veterans. Mussina was great, A-Rod and Abreu were solid, and Giambi provided enough bombs to keep this team out of fourth place.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, mostly because I’m upset the Mets lost. But also because I think that there is a tendancy today in the game to see ‘farm-based’ teams as the only way to win. Certainly ‘farm-based’ teams are nice. Or at least cheap.

But not necessarily better. In a year where the Yankees lost precisely because they didn’t trade away their propsects for a Johan or a Sabathia, and where the 2 best teams in MLB, the Sox and Cubs, are primarily free agent based, let’s not get carried away with how important prospects are.