Pick of the litter: The Retrieval Empire (TM) signs Brennan Boesch sweepstakes

This is a tale of our castaways...

OK, by now you know the Bone Collector has signed 6'4",  235-pound OF Brennan Boesch, replacing 10 of the Grandyman's lost home runs and more than half his annual strikeouts. That means we could have a LF platoon of Boesch and Ben Francisco, who - by the way - are statistical astral twins, according to the number crunchers at Baseball Reference.

Well, beggars can't be choosers. On the plus side, we get a guy who isn't 35, looks good coming off the bus and something to prove. John Sterling man-loves him, by the way. Boesch has always killed the Yankees, so at least he's off the streets. He hits with runners on base - that's weird, eh? And it's another sign the brain trust recognizes the darkness looming in April and May, and maybe the season.

On the minus side, well, it's just another scrap heap acquisition, another nickel and dime expenditure, as we seek to pretend that we didn't sign any stud outfielders over the winter.  We never even returned calls to Josh Hamilton or Torii Hunter, or a slew of other hitters who were not that expensive; they just wanted two or three year deals, and the Yankees don't give two and three year deals anymore.

In the dead zone of the 1980s, whenever Old George tried to save money, it always seemed to backfire; he ended spending more to replace the players he cut, and the new guys - the Shirleys and Kemps - often sucked. As we troll spring training camps, gathering castoffs like a whale sucking up plankton, the meter keeps rising. In the end, will we spend less money... or more? And how good will we be?

The guiding symbol for the Yankees is no longer the interlocking NY. The players should wear "189" on their caps. That's the $189 million salary cap, which right now looms as rigidly as anything the NFL or NBA has implemented. What's amazing is how smoothly it came down - without cannon fire from the player's union. The commissioner de-clawed the big-spending Yankees, and now, our big acquisition is a .240 castoff who couldn't beat out Andy Dirks.

Well, who knows? Maybe he'll hit .270.  Maybe we'll look back on 2013 as the start of the Boesch/Francisco era in LF. I can hear Tony Bennett singing now... "I left my heart with Boesch Francisco..."