Opening Day costs from Cot's. If you give a miniscule $5MM leeway on that amount, you can add another two teams and bring it up to 76.7% of baseball that the Yankees leftovers outspend. Woe is the Yankees! They'd better raise payroll! I suppose outspending the world by leaps and bounds is the "Yankees way" but suggestions that they need to raise payroll to sign Lee and fill in the rest of the gaps makes me facepalm. If they do, it only speaks to the idiocy of the contracts they're doling out to begin with. If the Yankees can't compete with a payroll "just" twice as high as 76% of the rest of the teams in baseball, then perhaps the solution isn't raising the payroll; perhaps -- just perhaps -- the problem is they do a really poor job constructing their team and that's what needs to change. I am bothered that people have given up on Joba so quickly. Many pitchers that are now beating us, took a few years to come into their own. There is talk of de la Rosa, yet Joba's numbers are quite a bit better then his. Since a decent #3/#4 guy costs well over $10m, it seems nuts not to give Joba every opportunity to succeed. What happens if we sign Lee but NOT Andy, therefore freeing up $11m+ and go to battle with CC, Lee, Phil, AJ and Joba/Nova? Joba, our one-time future Ace is no longer fit to be a #5