WasWatching.com

Kevin Brown's gone. I'll guess Leiter is, too among others. Even if they replace them with 35 years old the team's average age will be less.

RICH, I think you're overlooking the fact that all the holdover players from last year will be one year older. E.g., suppose 20 of the players were the same. In order to keep the same average age the five new players would have be be a total of 20 years younger than the players they replaced. (This assumes that the average gives each team member equal weight. It would be better to give more weight to those who play more. However, the results for the Yankees wouldn't be much different either way.)

Without doing the math, I am fairly confident that the final 25-man squad as currently anticipated would be slightly older than last year's squad as it went into the playoffs.

Unfortunately, I think Cashman is correct that age tends to correlate with athleticism. This is a quality the Yankees have lacked in recent years and will likely lack in 2006.

uhh...just how athletic were Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, Frankie Rodriguez, John Lackey, Josh Beckett, Carl Pavano, Dontrelle Willis, Derek Lowe, Keith Foulke, and Scott Shields (among others)? Now some of them were young, some old, some threw hard, others threw soft, none of them were especially athletic (one, Schilling '04, was practically immobile). But they pitched, baby. And...the Yankees failed to hit when it counted. If I'm Cashman I'd worry about fielding the best 12 man staff in the majors, not whether some of the guys could run the steeplechase.