Maybe the New York Yankees will surprise everyone this year and pull a few rabbits out of Hal Steinbrenner’s hat, show a slight-of-hand dexterity that is too farfetched to contemplate, engage in a dazzling display of legerdemain that would exceed anything Houdini ever did.

Don’t bet on it.

If George Steinbrenner could return to earth briefly, he would banish son Hal to the Steinbrenner woodshed, or at least to the family horse farm in Ocala, Fla., to join older brother Hank, who has always been more comfortable around horses than baseball players.

If there was anything the elder Steinbrenner established in his years as the Yankees’ owner, it was spare no expense in his attempt to win. Now son Hal is establishing a new principle: spare no step to avoid paying tax on what historically for the Yankees has been an inflated payroll.

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Major League Baseball pays so much attention to its Jackie Robinson past that it ignores distasteful developments in the present.

Baseball joined the Jackie Robinson Foundation last week in remembering and honoring the man who courageously broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. But baseball does this every year along with staging other events, such as the now annual civil rights game.

Robinson deserves to be remembered for what he did, but he would not be impressed with MLB’s hiring record in recent years. On the contrary, he’d be disappointed, if not disgusted. If MLB has a minority hiring program, it hasn’t made an impact in recent years.

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If Elvis Andrus had been at the World Baseball Classic instead of in the Texas Rangers’ spring training camp he would not have acquired a massive two-day tattoo on his left arm and would not have had to miss a day of workouts.

If Mike Matheny had been at the WBC instead of running around and running the St. Louis Cardinals’ spring camp, would he have been plagued with a herniated disc?

Had Brian Cashman been at the WBC overseeing conditions for his New York Yankees’ players, would he have wrecked his right leg and ankle parachuting out of a United States Army Golden Knights airplane?

All right, so manager Matheny and general manager Cashman weren’t eligible for the third Classic, but their circumstances help make the point I seem to make every year at this time, when Major League Baseball and the Players Association stage the quadrennial Classic.

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