- Insensitive

Yesterday, the New York Yankees signed a free-agent pitcher to an all-time record, 7-year, $161 million deal. This, after they had a soft agreement to sign him for only $14o million. The next closest bidder was offering just a mere $100 million, still a staggering amount for someone to play a sport. If you do the simple math, the Yankees had a F-O-R-T-Y M-I-L-L-I-O-N D-O-L-L-A-R lead to sign the player. The general manager then flew out to San Francisco to meet with him and his family personally, and then upped the offer by $21 million.

This is December. December job layoffs reached a tally of 115,000 and that was after November was pretty bad too.

I'm a Yankees fan. I'm fan because of fond childhood memories of watching the Yankees in the 1970s beat the 'small-market' Kansas City Royals to advance to the World Series. Reggie Jackson. Chris Chambliss. A crying Freddy Patek sitting in the Royals dugout after Chambliss hit a walk-off home run. I'm a fan of the history of the Yankees, the year-after-year battles against the Boston Red Sox for American League supremacy.

I'm really rethinking my allegiance now. How can the Yankees pay such a ridiculous amount of money at a time when they will open a brand-new stadium in 2009, and will need to pay for it by the purchases of tickets by fans. These fans are not immune to the recession and these fans need to tighten their belts and cut back and maybe hundreds, if not thousands of loyal Yankee fans recently lost their jobs because of the economy. The Yankees (and Mets, who are also opening a new stadium in 2009) even went back to the city of New York to ask for $450 million more in bonds to help pay for their new stadiums.

They have the audacity to go back to the city for more money on one hand, while paying an outrageous amount of money for a player who only plays every fifth game? This is very disappointing to me. I am rethinking my fandom to a team that wants to buy a championship (the Florida Marlins have done just that twice) and ignore using their minor league system to groom good, future players or even make a trade or two like most teams do to improve their roster.

I'm thinking hard about not being a Yankees fan. I mean, really, it wouldn't be that hard, NOT living in NYC, and I have my own (frustrating) Rockies to pull for, but it seems the Yanks almost always make the post-season, and I thoroughly enjoy MLB playoffs. But, I do have a strange feeling rooting for a team that did what it just did this week.