I love the smell of Yankee fan panic in the morning

... it smells like ... victory:

this offseason Brian Cashman publicly bashed the face of the franchise, forced the best relief pitcher in the history of baseball to talk to Red Sox, scaled a building in Stamford, Conn., had dinner with Carl Crawford and then hours later Crawford signed with the Red Sox and now you can add letting a pitcher turn down seven years and $154 million to that list.

That comes from Neil Keefe of CBS New York. He’s saying that in a joking tone, but I think it speaks to real anxiety. Certainly the remainder of his very long hand-wringing column about the allegedly dire straits the Yankees are in and his distrust of Brian Cashman show it. And I’m sure there are Yankees fans out there who are saying similar things in 100% seriousness.

Yankeefreude has its limits -- you can only get so much enjoyment from negativity after all -- but I can’t say that it isn’t somewhat amusing to see fans of the Bombers have to face the kind of uncertainty about their roster that fans of every other team have had to face over the past 15 years. Welcome to being regular baseball fans, Yankee Universe. Ain’t it great?

But don’t worry. Unlike the rest of us, you’ll only have to feel it for a couple of weeks, at which time your team will make some crazy move that 25-27 other teams couldn’t due to payroll restrictions. Then, later, you can talk about how awful this all was with other Yankees fans. Sort of like the time you got lost in a bad part of town during your last trip to Paris or something. “Really, I thought I was going to die ...”