By John Klima
Staff Writer

Born out of desperation, insecurity and the Boston Red Sox, the Yankees have slapped a $4.5 million a month swatch of gauze and tape over a major league pitching staff that will soon be comprised of a left-hander and his trustworthy slider, an erudite right-hander who might look to see if the phrase knuckle-curve is a hint in today’s crossword, and the most lavish prize of them all, the ancient Roger Clemens.

It is the Yankee Way to win by getting older, to stock its roster with players whose age is best determined with carbon dating rather than birth certificates, and to hope that Clemens can again be the wonder worker. With a $28 million pro-rated contract and 44-year-old legs, they need Clemens to be a savior who can do the unimaginable – actually pitch into the seventh inning, which in the day and age, is really asking quite a lot of a big league starting pitcher.

The price tag of Clemens, though, belies what has been the weakest aspect of the Yankee organization from the bottom up for the past 10 years – the inability to produce young starting pitching, to acquire it, to draft it, to sign it, to develop it, and to win with it. You can’t come up with one power arm every ten years (Mariano Rivera, next stop, rookie Phil Hughes, who the Yankees hope can recover from his hamstring injury as soon as possible) and expect to win, no matter how much money you can afford to throw at a problem. A look at the major league roster right now shows four pitchers originally signed by the club, with only one pitcher, Sean Henn, a 26th round pick in the year 2000, who was drafted this century.

Carbon dating really wasn’t a bad idea, after all.

The best you can say about the Yankees at this point is that they’ve approached their lack of organizational pitching depth from every avenue available: Latin America and the International market, the amateur draft, and to pilfering what arms they can grab from other organizations via trade and the waiver wire. These efforts don’t get a lot of publicity, because let’s face it: A-Rod doesn’t pitch.

The easiest solution is to say that the Yankees should overspend in Latin America with the same reckless win-at-all costs ambition that they use at the major league level. Become the feared monster in the room, the way baseball trembles at the mention of the Yankees at the trade deadline. Spend more money scouting Latin America, spend more gambling on kids who can throw hard, have no command, and display emotional inconsistencies. Pedro Martinez did not become Pedro Martinez overnight, and his is the fitting example that Latin pitchers require a longer learning curve than their domestic brethren.

A curving dirt road in Santo Domingo leads to Boca Chica, the site the Yankees chose to build their four-building, four-field Latin Baseball Academy, the first in club history. The main house of the facility is a white plantation style building, like a mansion overlooking a sugar cane field. The facility is less than two years old and alone represents a major shift in organizational philosophy.

“We’ve never had as many fields or as many batting cages,” said Mark Newman, New York’s VP of baseball operations. “We’ve never had this level of control over player nutrition or this kind of strength and conditioning facility.”

So while the Angels have produced Ramon Ortiz, Ervin Santana and Francisco Rodriguez in the past decade, the Yankees have been a non-factor in the region. The Mariners signed Felix Hernandez and a slew of Dominican power arms. The Dodgers have never ceased to be a player in the region. The Yankees learned on the pride of Panama, Mariano Rivera, who they signed in 1990, and were consistently beaten over a decade in the fields of Latin America.

That has started to change, though the major league results probably won’t be visible at a high-profile level for a number of years. According to one report of all International signings of $50,000 or more in 2006, Seattle led the majors with 21 acquisitions, while Texas and the Yankees where second, each with 14.

The Yankees should spend with abandon in the International market. For the cost of one month of Clemens, baseball’s version of the $15 bottle of water at a hotel bar, you can wade into the waters and pull out dozens of good-field, no-hit, strong-armed raw athletes, and play the Latin American lottery.

Or you can buy a ticket close to home. But the truth is you have to do both, or risk becoming an organization that has next to no variety.

Hughes represents that pitching poster boy the Yankees have lacked for a decade, a true power-armed starter with a 95-mile-an-hour fastball and a put-away curveball. Hughes fell to the Yankees with the 23rd pick in the first round of the 2004 draft, and it took a modest $1.4 signing bonus to buy Hughes out of playing at Santa Clara University. Nothing against the West Coast Conference, but Hughes got better, quicker, when he went into pro ball.

Hughes is also a reason why the Yankees can’t build from the draft alone, even though their track record shows they’re improving. Because of their success, the college-ready power arms almost never get to them, leaving them to purchase the likes of 2006 first-rounder Ian Kennedy, a nice command-oriented right-hander destined for a Bob Tewksbury-like career.

What they have done is added organizational depth through the last seven drafts. In addition to Hughes, right-handers T.J. Beam (10th round), Colter Bean (a non-drafted free agent in 2000), Jeff Karstens (19th round, 2003) and Jeff Kennard (40th round, 2000) are on the 40-man roster, with all but Kennard having pitched for the Yankees. The Yankees have finally shown signs that their scouts are getting dirty in the amateur world, pulling finds from the lower rounds of the draft, which as far as pitchers go, means looking at more than what the radar gun says. This is important, because there aren’t enough power arms to go around. But it also means that if you’re the New York Yankees, you should never get beaten on acquiring one that you have the chance to, either. To that extent, they wouldn’t allow anyone to beat them to Clemens.

You have to beat other teams to other arms as well, even the sort of pitching that isn’t exactly savior material, but if a club can stockpile enough of it, it’s much easier and cheaper to plug the holes in a season than it is to bribe Clemens out of his retirement. Their most pronounced organizational step came in last year’s draft, where the Yankees almost completely ignored position players in the first ten rounds despite objections from some members of the organization.

The Yankees took pitchers with eight of their first ten picks last June, seven of which were college pitchers, including Kennedy from USC and Joba Chamberlain from Nebraska. It will be worth following the approach the Yankees take in the coming draft, to see if they again stockpile college arms, which, if so, would again represent a departure from the belief that offense does everything.

The Yankees have also had improved success digging into other organizations, taking Darrell Rasner off waivers from the Washington Nationals (who, let’s face it, have pitching to burn) prior to last season. They have dug into other organizations, stockpiling arms typically drafted from the college ranks, taking a potential future starter in right-hander Ross Ohlendorf for Randy Johnson, and another young arm in Steven Jackson, in the same trade. Both pitchers are upgrades over arms already on the 40-man roster. They took a decent double-A starter, Kevin Whelan, and an organizational single-A right-hander, Anthony Clagget, from the Tigers for Gary Sheffield. The pitcher they coveted in the trade, right-hander Humberto Sanchez, is on the 60-day disabled list.

For all this effort, until the game truly cycles back to the point where pitching-to-contact is again respected and valued, the Yankees will have to work hard not only to replenish their depth, but to not get beaten on acquiring power arms. The Florida Marlins should not have stronger, younger and more quality arms than the New York Yankees do. To shift such an emphasis requires a continued commitment to the direction they’ve started. If you sign them, the command will come, and one of those skinny teenagers will grow up to become a little Pedro clone. That way, when Clemens is looking for a multi-million dollar meal ticket off the golf course in the year 2016, you won’t have to crank up the publicity machine, or re-sign Whitey Ford, who, at that point, will be 88 years old, and probably only be good for getting lefties out anyhow.

John Klima is a baseball writer for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.