Who’s going to be the fifth starter?
Should we flip-flop the centerfielder and the left-fielder?
Who bats second, the DH with the .402 career on-base percentage, or the outfielder who hit 30 home runs last season?
Of such questions are free and easy spring trainings born and World Series-or-bust expectations generated.
Those are what passed for heavy-duty decisions for Yankee manager Joe Girardi to ponder the last six weeks down in Tampa, about on par with which wine to order to accompany a nice surf-and-turf dinner.
Things are back in order for the Bombers, the nagging doubts of a string of October failures erased by last season’s World Series win over Phillies. The desperate winter of 2008, re-loading with free agents CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira after a third-place finish barred the Yanks from the playoffs for the first time since 1993, is now way in the distance.
Back to operating from from strength, general manager Brian Cashman spent the offseason tinkering with the edges of the canvas in order to send a roster into the 2010 season that looks even stronger than the collection that won 103 games in 2009.
Curtis Granderson — younger, faster, better defensively and with more of a power stroke — supplanted Johnny Damon. Nick Johnson, who reaches base 40 percent of the time and seems to have spent roughly the same percentage of his major-league career on the disabled list, replaced Hideki Matsui as the designated hitter.
Those two moves gave Girardi a little something to think about before he decided that Granderson would play center, pushing Brett Gardner to left, and Johnson, not Granderson, would claim Damon’s old spot in the No. 2 hole between Derek Jeter and Teixeira.
It was the competition for that final rotation spot, a pedestrian duel of journeymen in most other places, that was more intriguing.
Wary of relying too much on unproven young pitchers as he did in 2008, Cashman brought back Javier Vazquez to fill the No. 4 spot in the rotation, leaving two of the pitchers who carried such great burdens for that 2008 season to battle it out for the fifth spot.
Expectations have been scaled back for Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain since then, when the two one-time first-round draft picks were stamped as front of the rotation starters. They were supposed to be the first wave of young arms that would spare Cashman from having to shop the free agent market for front-line pitching.
But after making 31 starts last season, struggling with command and consistency and finishing with a 4.75 earned run average, Chamberlain will start the 2010 season where a sizable contingent of observers believed he should be all along, in the bullpen. That’s where he blazed onto the scene late in the 2007 season, setting off a debate that may even be revived next spring if either Vazquez or Andy Pettitte doesn’t return.
Or if Hughes doesn’t deliver.
The 6-foot-4 righty was in the seventh inning of a no-hitter in his second major league start when a hamstring injury interrupted his 2007 season, and 2008 was a washout after an 0-4 start and a cracked rib.
Like Chamberlain, he found himself as a reliever in the majors last season, where the front-line stuff that had the Yankee brass excited about both pitchers again easily translated into dominance in a one-inning set-up role.
Now he’ll get another chance in the rotation after beating out Chamberlain for the spot, but free of the pressures that came with the job in 2008, when he was still just 21 years old as the season began and Cashman had bet a season on Hughes and Chamberlain and Ian Kennedy.
Kennedy is gone, sent to Arizona in the three-team Granderson deal, but Hughes and Chamberlain remain, and neither is even 25 years old yet. Plenty of time to deliver on their promise now that the Yankees have decided what to do with them in the course of that stressful spring.