Ladies and gentlemen, after weeks of position battles and scrap heap pickups, here are your 2013 New York Yankees…

The pitching staff, specifically the front of the rotation and the back of the bullpen, is the clear strength of the club right now. Cano is the focal point of the offense and he won’t get a damn thing to hit with men on-base or the late innings of close games. It will be up to Youkilis, Hafner, and Wells to make the other club pay in those spots, and it’ll also be up to Robbie to not get himself out by chasing pitcher’s pitches off the plate. He did that quite a bit in the postseason last year.

Wells takes over as the everyday left fielder while Overbay will start at first base against righties — Youkilis will slide over to first with Nix playing third against southpaws. Francisco could replace Hafner, Ichiro, or Gardner against lefties. Boesch … I’m not quite sure what the plan is there, but he figures to get some work as a left-handed bat off the bench, particularly as a pinch-hitter for the Stewvelli catching tandem against tough righties late in close games. Eppley and Warren are just keeping the bullpen seats warm until Hughes (mid-April?) returns.

Thankfully, the Yankees are not married to this roster all season. It’s just the Opening Day roster. Jeter, Granderson, and Teixeira are all expected back at some point in the first half and are better than their replacements, even if their performances suffer a bit as the result of the injuries. Pineda, Cabral, and A-Rod are all second half players, if anything. I think it’s very safe to call this a patchwork roster in need of major in-season reinforcements, either by players returning from injury or through trades.

I had a feeling a report like this would surface eventually, but I thought it would take until next offseason. Ken Rosenthal says the Yankees’ plan to get under the $189M luxury tax threshold might not be as lucrative as the team originally anticipated due to various goings-on around the league. I’ll let him explain…

Under the labor agreement, the 15 clubs in the largest markets will forfeit an increasing percentage of their revenue-sharing proceeds starting in 2013, and become ineligible for any such money by ’16.

The revenue-sharing funds that would have gone to those clubs then would be redistributed to payors such as the Yankees. The idea is to motivate certain big-market clubs — the Toronto Blue Jays, for example — to increase their revenues, knowing that they no longer would qualify for revenue-sharing money.

From that perspective, the plan appears to be working — the Blue Jays, Washington Nationals and Atlanta Braves are among the big-market clubs that anticipate higher revenues next season, according to major league sources.

Such developments would reduce the size of the market-disqualification pot — and in turn reduce the percentage of that pot the Yankees would receive.

In English, that means there were top 15 market size teams that were not among the top 15 revenue generators, like the Nationals and Blue Jays. Those teams received revenue sharing payments but are now disqualified under the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, and the money they would have been received goes back to the clubs that paid out. Since they’re generating more revenue though, they would have received a smaller piece of a revenue sharing pie and thus the Yankees won’t get back as much. Got it?

Rosenthal cites a Joel Sherman report I don’t remember seeing that says the Yankees anticipated $10M in revenue sharing savings by getting under the luxury tax threshold in 2014. That then jumps up to $40M (annually, I assume) if they continue to stay under in subsequent years, something Hal Steinbrenner has confirmed they will do. All of that is on top of the money saved by not paying the luxury tax, which is a decent chunk of change. Just based on the team’s revenue sharing number ($10M) plus the luxury tax (~$12M) plus the general payroll reduction (~$20M), the Yankees are looking at something like $42M in savings in 2014.

None of this is a guarantee, of course. If teams like the Blue Jays and Nationals don’t generate as much revenue as expected — or if (when, really) a revenue sharing payor like the Astros turns into a payee due to a revenue drop — the Yankees will get a larger rebate on their revenue sharing payment. We also have no idea how exactly they calculated their potential savings either, but I’m guessing the club evaluated several scenarios before deciding to scale back payroll. And yeah, I’m willing to bet at least one of those scenarios involves missing the postseason and losing out on millions in playoff revenue.

Geez, that wasn’t even a good move Brett.

Three notable rule changes were approved at last week’s owners’ meetings, and they must now being given the okay by the players’ union before they can be officially implemented this coming season. That isn’t expected to be much of an issue. Here’s the skinny on the changes, courtesy of Jayson Stark…

• The Jeff Nelson move, as Michael Kay calls it, will now be considered a balk. That’s the ol’ fake-to-third, throw-to-first move. A handful of players fall for it each year. MLB can actually implement this without the union’s approval, but they’ll run it by the players for the sake of labor relations peace.
• Coaches and managers will now be allowed to bring interpreters to the mound. That’s a pretty big deal and not just for the Hiroki Kuroda‘s and Hyun-Jin Ryu’s of the pitching world. There’s an awful lot of young Latin American-born pitchers who have yet to fully grasp the English language out there. Heck, I still haven’t grasped it.
• Teams can now have a seventh coach in uniform and in the dugout during games. They had been limited to six before. A number of teams are carrying second hitting coaches these days — the Yankees haven’t added one yet — and this accommodates them.