Chad Jennings talked to Hal Steinbrenner about getting the Yankees payroll down to $189 million (emphasis added):

“I’m a finance geek,” Steinbrenner said. “I guess I always have been. That’s my background. Budgets matter, and balance sheets matter. I just feel that if you do well on the player development side, and you have a good farm system, you don’t need a $220-million payroll. You don’t. You can field every bit as good a team with young talent. When you consider Banuelos and Betances and some of the pitching we have coming up with Nova and Hughes and Pineda, next year, when one of those two or both of those guys are up, we’re going to have the kind of young pitching, I don’t know when the last time was.

“… Luxury tax is an option. It’s a personal option. We do it. We go into it knowing exactly what we’re doing. Being the only team that does it, I’m just not convinced we need to be as high as we’ve been in the past to field a championship caliber team.”

If you think about it, during the Yankees dominance of the late 1990s, they were a team with young, cost controlled players, and they didn’t need to spend a fortune to round out the team. They could afford quality, and a very deep bench and rotation.

It sounds like Hal wants the Yankees to be the Rays with money. They could depend on youngsters, but unlike the Rays, be able to plug holes with talented free agents. If Steinbrenner and Cashman pull this off, they’ll be an even more dangerous team.

Of course, it’s not that easy. The Red Sox basically tried this under Theo Epstein. They did win two World Championships, but they didn’t make the playoffs every year and won just one division title. There is a lot more uncertainty building on prospects than on tested major league players.

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