Cliff Corcoran takes an indepth look at the signing of Miguel Cairo:

Of course the big concern over the Cairo signing is, "what if Jeter or Cano get hurt and he has to start." Well, Jeter missed almost a month and a half at the beginning of the 2003 season, the Yankees replaced him with Erick Almonte, who has since fallen all the way to the independent leagues at age 28, and went 26-11 in his absence, building up a three-game lead in the AL East. In 2000, Chuck Knoblauch missed more than a month and the Yankees went 25-15 with Luis Sojo and Jose Vizcaino filling in, doubling their three game lead in the East over that stretch. Last Year, Robinson Cano missed a similar amount of time and the Yankees went 23-11 with Cairo and Green at the keystone and turned a 2.5 game deficit in the division to a 2 game lead. That's not to say that those players aren't valuable, but that, as the above attempted to illustrate, it's not a disaster to field a replacement level player in the middle infield for a while.

Besides which, the Yankees happen to have one of the best keystone combinations in baseball. Derek Jeter was a legitimate MVP candidate last year and is a sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer and Robinson Cano is the best second baseman in the American League and likely second only to Chase Utley in all of baseball. The Yankees are not going to be able to properly replace either of those players regardless of the quality of their backup. The best they can do is hope to maintain some baseline level of ability in their absence. Miguel Cairo is the definition of that baseline.

My only comment is that Cliff left Alberto Gonzalez off the list of possible farm hands that could move up. He came over in the Randy Johnson deal.