How about the mucking up of what is potentially Wayne Gretzky's last season? Fuhgedaboutit.

Nope, all eyes are trained on one man soft tossing at Legends Field. The man who owns a record five Cy Young awards. The man who prepares for each season by jamming his arm through a barrel of rice.

It's just not fair.

This trade reeks of all that is wrong with baseball. A star player, under contract, demands a trade to a contending team. Never mind that his team won 88 games last season--four short of a post-season berth.

Stuck with this contract demand, Blue Jays General Manager Gord Ash shopped Clemens around to the handful of teams that can offer fair trade value and afford his salary. The latter was far more prohibitive--just ask Astros General Manager Gerry Hunsicker.

After a while, the market dissipated for all except for one team--the Yankees. Steinbrenner has the money and the moxie to sit tight and wait for the opportunity to throw around his bucks.

Lo and behold, Ash made Yanks General Manager Brian Cashman an offer that Cashman said "made my knees buckle."

Cashman did not deliver any of his prized prospects in Columbus for this deal. But rest assured, if an act of God has the Yankees needing players mid-season, the checkbook will come out again.

It's a luxury few can afford to do. Sure, give Stick Michael and Cashman credit for assembling the roster, but it's cold hard cash that keeps the players there. It keeps a contending team intact.

Baseball has a burgeoning disaster on its hands as fewer and fewer teams can afford to assemble a contending team. Each year a couple more teams get defined as "small market." A couple more teams become fodder for the Bronx Bombers.

I even heard some dim wits on WEEI, Boston's wanna-be WFAN, refer to the Red Sox, with the fifth-highest payroll in baseball last year, in such terms.

As the list grows, more teams will have a difficult time offering their fans a good reason to come to the park.

Back in the Golden Era of the 1950s, when New York teams won every year as well, the national pastime at least offered innocence and a wholesome atmosphere parents could afford to take their kids to often.

"I finally got you," Steinbrenner reportedly told Clemens upon the consumation of the deal.

He got him because he always gets what he wants. He got him because one headline is more important than the viability of five lesser franchises.