As a Yankees’ fan, I realized I might be headed for a frustrating season when I became dismayed at my favorite team’s failures to sign Jeff Keppinger and Nate Schierholtz. That admission is not intended as an insult to Keppinger or Schierholtz; they are both solid players and deserve the millions they earned from the White Sox and Cubs, respectively. But the very possibility that they would have been pegged to start for the Yankees in 2013 is a frightening prospect.

I have grown up loving the Yankees second only to my family (well, my parents will read this column, so I have to write as much). Derek Jeter was the knight in shining, pinstriped armor in my bedtime stories; the crack of a bat sawn into pieces by Mariano Rivera’s cutter was my lullaby; and my veins still throb and pulse with the Bronx Bomber beat.

I was born in 1994, the same year that the playoffs were cancelled due to the players’ strike, and since then …

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Stan Kasten, president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, declared no interest in or concern for the geographical fiction Arte Moreno concocted eight years ago. That was when Moreno hijacked his neighbor’s name and anointed his team as the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

When I recently asked Kasten, who assumed his role when a new ownership group took control of the Dodgers earlier this year, how he felt about the Angels’ name, he dismissed the matter.

“If I had a list of a thousand things to do,” he responded, “that would be a thousand and one.”

Finding the name intellectually offensive from the day Moreno announced it, I bring it up now because of recent developments. If the name the Angels have usurped were legitimate, Major League Baseball could promote one of the highlights of the coming season as the battle for Los Angeles. The Angels and the Dodgers have certainly spent a lot of time and money creating that picture.

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If Sandy Alderson, the New York Mets’ general manager, has never seen the movie “The Wizard of Oz” or hasn’t seen it in a long time, he should see it and pay particular attention to the moment Dorothy says to her little dog, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

Allow me to paraphrase this for Alderson: “I’m not in Oakland anymore.”

When Alderson was general manager and later president of the Athletics, their fans understood the team didn’t have money to spend lavishly for players. Alderson actually preceded Billy Beane as the architect of a title-winning Oakland team. There just wasn’t anyone around to write a book and make a movie about him.

Now that Alderson is in New York, though, his team’s fans won’t be as patient and understanding as the A’s fans were.

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