I'm going to tie all this together, so bear with me.  DaddyO posts the sobering fact that the Ms have been outscored for six seven consecutive seasons.  In other words, ever since the 01 bunch collectively fell to Earth.  In fact, baseball-reference.com has all the dirt right here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/SEA/

This brings to my mind: Derek Jeter and Aaron Rodgers.

The timing is surely coincidental, but the Yanks are in the midst of their war of nerves with Jeter at the exact moment that the Vikings are crumbling to dust and Aaron Rodgers is knocking on the door of Manning-Brady classification.

In other words, the extremely gutsy and apparently brilliant decision of the Packers to divorce themselves from Brett Favre's personal saga is starting to reveal its full depth.

Yes, the Vikings got within one play of the Super Bowl, but less than one year later they are a complete mess and in need being gutted down to the studs (by "studs" I mean Adrian Peterson).  The Packers, on the other hand, appear to be set for the next decade or so with Rodgers.

Of course, the problem is knowing that your "Aaron Rodgers" is, in fact, going to be "Aaron Rodgers" and not "Brady Quinn" or "Matt Leinart."

So let's go back to 2004 -- who were those 30-plus oldsters holding back?  Well, other than 20-year-old Jose Lopez (who eventually did unseat Brett Boone in 05), exactly no one who became a major-league regular.  Witness: Jeremy Reed, Justin Leone, Greg Dobbs, Bucky! Jacobson (yeah, he got hurt) and the immortal Hiram Bocachica (whose 94 OPS+ was higher than Olerud's).

I know Sandy has pointed this out many times, but they were simultaneously running full speed off the cliff and failing to build a safety net.  That is, they had a team full of Favres, and even when they cut their losses (too late), they had no Rodgers on the bench.

And Bavasi, whom I defended more than many did, was very much the wrong guy to step in.  Lacking the ability to find the Rodgers among the Quinns and Leinarts, he kept bringing in Jon Kitnas and Jake Delhommes hoping to stay afloat.  So the construction of the safety net started five years late.

The Yankees are clearly at their "2003 Mariners" moment. The Favre example notwithstanding, how much do you pay to avoid the fate of seeing the face of your franchise get his 3,000th hit in a different uniform?  Admittedly, the Yankees are not quite the same as the typical team in terms of limited resources -- a Jeter deal may not be the "zero sum game" that it would be for other teams.  And certainly the development of Cano gives them a young hitting star that Jose Lopez never became.  But it will be interesting to see how it plays out.