The Yankees need an owner who will step up

On paper, let's play the entire 2017 season tomorrow. One-sixty-two games, bang, done. Where do the Yankees finish? Well, I figure Boston, Cleveland and Texas win the divisions. Houston grabs one wild card. We chase the final slot. If Aaron Judge comes through, who knows? But one glaring deficiency will hurt us: It's the rotation, stupid. We don't have one.

Last year, Yankee pitchers threw 1,428 innings, overall. Our five main starters - Tanaka, CC, Pineda, Nova and Eovaldi - gave us 774, slightly more than half. The other 33 starts came from Luis Severino, Chad Green, Bryan Mitchell and Luis Cessa - S-GMC. If you figure a decent starter goes six innings, that's - um, okay, let's see, um, six times 162, anybody got a calculator? um, carry the two, GOT IT: In a winning season, a team's starters should throw about 972 innings. That's 200 more than our top five gave us last year. And, well, right now... nothing has changed.

Barring injuries, Tanaka can provide 200 innings (he did 199 last year), CC can again donate 180, and Pineda - let's say he repeats at 175. That's about 550 innings. With Eovaldi and Nova gone, we're down to S-GMC, four kids, each of whom would be shut down after throwing 150 innings... assuming any get that far. Forget the talk about needing a bullpen lefty. We need a starter.

Now, we could trade the future for Jose Quintana, and go right back to 2015. That would suck. What we need is a unicorn... an out-of-nowhere find: We need a thirtysomething retread who signs a one-year deal and has something to prove. The scrap heap is supposed to be Cashman's wheelhouse; he studies the waiver wire the way Trump does areola.

What we need is the next Bartolo Colon - the '11 model, which Cashman then signed as a 38-year-old bowling ball who had been taking exotic jungle therapies, which everybody knew were sketchy, but he was so cute and cuddly, and such a long shot that nobody asked questions until he was in the All-Star game, peeing King Kong's testosterone. We need a guy who right now is somewhere in a Honduras-based, Bond super-villian complex, drinking vampire blood smoothies. We need Bartolo II.

And we need an owner who is willing to own up. I won't name names. But this particular owner needs to get off his Hello Kittty fanny pack and sign a veteran pitcher for $8 to $10 million on a one-year deal. Somebody will bite. If this guy gives us 170 innings, we can get the rest from S-GMC, and in that season we just played tomorrow... we could snag that final Wild Card slot.

Moreover, this unicorn pitcher can disappear next winter, when the unnamed owner finally cuts his precious payroll and can once again afford butter. It's a one-off deal, a one-year expense. We don't need an outfielder. We need an owner. Anybody know of one we can trade for?