I truly believe the main business of baseball is community relations.  I  am not talking about the visit the sick kids in the hospital kind, but really the kind that caused the Mayor of Milwaukee to dub the city ‘Major League’ when they wooed the Braves from Boston oh so many years ago. Though sports are entertainment, it is what a team adds to the city that gives it value.  For most, it is the world wide attention that the city garners from having a sports team, and that his why its important that at least a few different teams make it to the playoffs every year.  In New York though the stage is a little different.  Sure, the number of people gives the Yankees and the Mets a much larger advantage because there are so many people to pay for a ticket, a much larger market to serve.  But what a team like the Yankees offers the community is a very different thing than what the Indians or the Rays offer theirs.   New York, as a whole, doesn’t gain anything if the Yankees aren’t in the post-season.  The community has enough things drawing the world attention to the place, that just winning 90 games isn’t special enough.  That is why the Yankee mantra of ‘its not enough to make it to the play-offs’ works here.  It’s why, as Ken Davidoff’s piece is interesting. Davidoff seeks the middle ground of ‘win now’ and ‘youth movement’, though the latter patch of ground is decidedly small.   The Yankees might be the only team to leave one rotation spot available and call it a youth movement, and what’s more they might get burned by the local fans if they don’t resign Andy Pettitte and instead give that last spot to Phil Hughes or one of the other Yankee raised pitchers.  We often speak about the Yankees playing a different economic game, but there is more to it than that.  Brian Cashman, I think, found that out over the last couple of years.  Sure, his competitiveness wanted to build a team that could win, but I believe he also wanted to show he could build a team under the same rules as the rest of the league and win… and extra challenge.  The problem is that if the Yankees don’t win, then they are not only a failure in the eyes of George Steinbrenner, but also in the eyes of the city and the rest of the country.  The Mets have found out a similar thing though it took a bizarre set of events — two blown seasons– to put them in the same position. The Mets are still held in check by owners who consider the Mets a part of the portfolio and not the centerpiece.  They still have to return something on the investment each year, while the Yankees do not.  While New York teams are not held to the same restrictions  on payroll the expectation are much, much higher. A couple of consecutive seasons of not making the playoffs in New York, however, will quickly find them relegated to the “in other news” category, something that no baseball team in any city can afford.