i'm the first one to say you guys have had hard luck with pitching this year, particularly with injuries. and i agree with you that pettitte is your best big-game pitcher right now. furthermore, i wouldn't be surprised if rocket guts out a dominant performance today. he's certainly been known to before. but i also wouldn't be surprised if he's gone by the 4th inning.

to me, the yankee rotation at the beginning of the year looked shaky. Pavano, Pettitte, Mussina, Igawa, and I forget who the fifth was: Karstens? Rasner? i figured pavano would continue to suck, but i also figured wang would come back and be serviceable to good. pettitte and mussina were crapshoots. both are clearly in their waning years; pettitte has been a pleasant surprise, after his injury year in houston in '04- he actually had a better era this year than last despite pitching in the AL again. and i love moose, but you knew that sooner or later his body would start to betray him. that it happened this year is not a huge surprise.

signing rocket was a bad move "in retrospect"? no, i think a lot of folks around baseball thought the rocket signing was a little insane, given that he had been in the NL for a few years, and rarely went past 6 innings, and hadn't even pitched for half the year. given all the injuries you guys sustained, i'm not saying cashman was wrong to do something. but the point you were arguing was that he was "going for youth" this year, and while it's true with joba and hughes, the rocket signing was a direct contradiction to that. if cashman looked a little harder and/or had been a little more creative, i imagine he could have gotten roger's 6 victories from somewhere else, at a far cheaper price. the $28M seemed like something of a wildly optimistic expectation, fueled by headlines of clemens being a savior of new york's season.

all in all, i'm just saying that i don't think anyone can argue that the yankees have ever had consistently dominant starting pitching this year.

when your rotation has joba and hughes in it regularly, it's going to be killer. wang is going to be at least average-to-good for a few years. the clock has run out on moose. pettitte? i'd be surprised if he comes back next season, but if he does, i wouldn't expect his numbers to stay on a par with this year's. getting some youth into your back end should be cashman's next priority. by "youth" i don't mean rookies, i mean an established veteran in his late 20s/early 30s.

Please stop beating the "over 40" comment. I've retracted it twice above.

The "spirit" of the comment is not wrong. We were talking about your postseason starting rotation, not callups who are sitting in the bullpen. The starting rotation is comparatively old. And calling up kids is not a "significant change in direction" if you still go out and sign Roger Clemens midseason. The Yankees have "called up kids" in the past (see Wang). But they have also always supplemented those call ups by cherry-picking expensive established star veterans (see Pavano, R. Johnson). Injuries are a part of the game. Other teams deal with them differently.

What are the others?

Your starting rotation. This whole thread is about my thinking it's a soft spot.

How about next year?

Next year remains to be seen what you guys do, doesn't it? Wang will be reliable. Joba may work out as a starter--or not.  Hughes has the goods and I think will be a solid starter for years to come. So you have two, maybe 3 spots set. After that, all bets are off. Pettitte may retire, and if he doesn't I would still expect his numbers to slip given his age. This year was impressive, but his his most recent 3-4 years don't point to him repeating it. Moose could rebound or could slip further down the hill. If Cashman looks in the offseason and doesn't buy another aging veteran and promoted Kennedy instead, I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Wrong on this.

Yup, I admitted that above, as well. Most years, you feast on us and TB; this year you didn't. I should have looked it up.