"The other teams in baseball want to win. The ones with a realistic chance to win, and that means win it all, do the best they can to put themselves in the best position to do that. The Yankees are different. The Yankees have to win, and that never just means the American League East with them. The Yankees are operated in a way, even when they have the best record in baseball, that makes you think that if they don't keep adding players and spending money, they are going to somehow turn into sports dummies like the Dolans.

So now they bring in Lance Berkman, Kerry Wood and Austin Kearns as this year's difference-makers at the trade deadline, even though guys like that are nothing more than sidebars to Roy Oswalt, at least at this point.

And what is interesting about these moves, a few weeks after the Yankees don't pull off the trade for Cliff Lee, is that the Yankees continue to be general-managed, in an almost twitchy way, as if there's something missing. As if the Rays, a team spending nearly $140 million less than Brian Cashman gets to spend on baseball players, scare them more than the bogey man.

So they go hard after Lee even before Andy Pettitte went down with a groin injury. They think they have Lee locked down good before they get too cute and the story on Lee gets out prematurely. Now Berkman, who somehow has gone from hitting over 40 home runs in the big leagues to 13 this season, is supposed to make up for the fact that Nick Johnson, the great pitch-taker, never really showed up this season.

Kearns? He is supposed to make up for the fact that Curtis Granderson can't hit lefthanded pitching here any better than he did in Detroit."