Baseball player salaries occupied much of my time for nearly three decades of my coverage of the game. I thought I had left salaries and payrolls behind when I turned to writing columns in 2004, but like the proverbial bad penny, they keep coming back.

This season provides a good example. The Yankees and the Dodgers have made it imperative to pay attention to payrolls, the Dodgers with their humungous spending spree toward the end of last season and the off-season and the Yankees with their declared intention to slash their perennially highest payroll (an all-time high $230 million this year, according to the Associated Press) to a non-tax level $189 million by next season.

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Bud Selig, the long-time baseball commissioner, does not need me to toot his horn or defend him; his achievements in two decades as commissioner, speak loudly in his behalf. Anyway, any defense I offer of him would very likely prompt critics to accuse me of being his personal p.r. man. Of course, anyone who has read my columns about some of Selig’s follies would find me a strange kind of p.r. man.

But I have a unique view of the commissioner. I have probably known him longer and have covered him longer than any other reporter or columnist. We go back four decades, more than half of our lifetimes, to the time he owned the Milwaukee Brewers and I covered the New York Yankees for The New York Times.

We have had our differences over the years, still do, but we have remained amicable and completely understand each other’s job. The biggest difference in our jobs is money. Bud makes about $25 million more a year than I do. But what’s a few dollars between friends?

I write all of this as a preface to the point I want to make. Despite my view of the things I disagree with that Selig has done as commissioner, I believe he has done a terrific job in his job. You can’t argue with the numbers. You can’t ignore them either.

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The first two e-mail messages I received from readers about recent acquisitions of the New York Yankees:

“Vernon Wells? Lyle Overbay ? This is embarrassing.”

“How can you not be excited for a Youkilis-Hafner-Wells-Juan Rivera middle of the order?”

And the Yankees are only now preparing to begin the season. It threatens to be a long season, a very long season.

The Yankees will open the season with four vital players on the disabled list – Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson. Their salaries total about 40 percent of the Yankees’ approximately $210 opening-day payroll.

Every team can expect to incur injuries, even to core players, but the Yankees are going beyond the line of expectation and acceptance. They are further undermined by their own wacky decision – a first in the 40-year reign of the Steinbrenner family – to keep payroll down so that next year they will be able to get under the $189 million luxury tax threshold.

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