It’s Time to Make Peace With the Cliff Lee Decision

History has shown that there comes a time where people must make peace with the changes wrought by a particular action or decision, even if the action or decision seems far too large to ever stop dominating your thoughts.

We've reached that point with Cliff Lee's decision to sign with a team other than the Yankees.

During a radio interview last week, Cliff Lee was asked about what team finished second to the Phillies in the bidding for his services. Why anyone would care about the answer to that question, outside of inane Yankee bashing, is beyond this feeble mind, but Lee said it was the Rangers. He said that the reason he wasn't into the Yankees was because the team was getting older.

That's interesting, because Lee signed with a team that has an older roster than the Yankees. And if you really wanted to argue the point, you could make a strong case that the Yankees have more good younger players contributing right now than the Phillies. You shouldn't argue the point, though, because it simply doesn't matter.

There's been a remarkable amount of mythmaking about Lee's choice to sign with the Phillies. The biggest is that he somehow chose to play for Philly nickels instead of New York dollars. That notion that simple math disproved in the hours after the terms of his contract were revealed, yet people still somehow believe that it was true. Now comes this bit of nonsense which is again factually untrue.

Wouldn't it be easier for Lee to just say he chose the Phillies because he wanted to play for the Phillies? The specific reasons why he wanted to play for the Phillies don't really matter because there was nothing the Yankees or anyone else could do to make themselves into the Phillies. The deal is long done, so let's all just let it lie.

That holds for anyone who plans to use it down the road as part of an argument against the job Brian Cashman did this winter as well. No matter how bad things get, you can't say that the reason the team's rotation isn't good enough is because they didn't land Lee. The Yankees did everything in their power to get him to the Bronx and he wasn't interested. No harm, no foul and no reason to wallow in it now that there's an actual season just around the corner.