Buying Ring 27??

Keeping in step with my blogging counterpart I too would like to address the Yankees current strategy, which is to seemingly revert back to what they've been trying to do since the good ol days of the mid to late 90's......buying championships. This season they "claimed" they were going to stick with their young up and comers and allow Hughes and Kennedy the chance to show that the Yankees have quality young arms in their farm system just like the Red Sox do. Wrong. That didn't work out to well. Also, I question whether or not that was really the strategy at all. Last year's free agent market wasn't anything great and I think that's more of the reason the Yanks claimed to want to "stick with the kids". Since that plan failed miserably the Yankees are back to throwing their money around and just trying to buy a team. What kills me though is that many Yankee fans alike think that the Red Sox do the same thing. It couldn't be further from the truth. The Red Sox have a starting line-up that consists of the following players- Ellsbury, Pedroia and Youkilis (all home grown), Ortiz (picked up on waivers), Bay (acquired in the Manny deal), Lowell (a throw-in in the Beckett deal), Drew (the lone ranger that one could say was "bought"), Varitek (brought over in a trade by Duquette), Lowrie (homegrown). Look at that line-up!! All of those guys except for Drew were NOT "bought". Instead they were either homegrown or ACQUIRED in trades. Now think of their pitching, Beckett (traded for Hanley Ramirez), Lester (homegrown), Wakefield (should be considered homegrown), Bucholtz and Masterson (homegrown) Dice K (more on him in a second), Papelbon, Delcarmen, (homegrown)Okajima (reasonable salary). The team is FULL of guys that represent everything the Yankees do not. Now Yankee idiots will point to Dice K as a guy who was "bought". I disagree. Dice K's salary is very reasonable for a front line pitcher. He makes basically 9 million a season for the next 4 years. The posting fee they paid to earn the right to deal with Dice K is more of a product of the Japanese rules than the Red Sox "buying" a pitcher. The Sox have ONE chance to post a fee and they are going up against other teams who are also posting SECRET bids. How can you compare that to anything else? You have 1 chance and you have no clue what the other guy is doing. That's a lot different then the Yankees KNOWING what the other offers are to CC Sabathia and STILL outbidding everyone by astronomical amounts. Plus, the Sox had no Japanese market. Getting Dice K was an investment. They made back that 50 million and then some. A couple weeks later the Yankees posted a bid for Kei Igawa for 20 million, then signed him to a lucrative salary and he's done nothing! And they didn't even gain the Japanese market because they already had it with Matsui! The Red Sox and Yankees are VERY different teams with very different strategy's. NY fans are fools if they can't see that. I'm not saying the Sox won't land a big free agent any time soon, but they are far from the Yankees who buy, buy and buy some more chasing that elusive title since the turn of the century.