Girardi: Open competition for 4th and 5th starter

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TAMPA, Fla.—The Yankees may take a month or more to decide on the fourth and fifth starters in their very unsettled pitching rotation.

"The chances of the fourth and fifth starter roles cheap jerseys being answered sooner than later are not very good," manager Joe Girardi said Monday as pitchers and catchers reported for spring training. "You want to see who we feel has the best chance to help us during the course of the season."

Candidates include Ivan Nova, Freddy Garcia, Sergio Mitre and Bartolo Colon. Girardi repeated that Joba Chamberlain is not an option, even though he lost his setup job late last season.
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"We've seen how dominate he can be in the bullpen," Girardi said. "Joba has a chance to be extremely important to our bullpen, and I'm looking forward to that."

Staff ace CC Sabathia, Phil Hughes and A.J Burnett fill the top three slots of a rotation that will be without Andy Pettitte, who retired.

"I know that's going to be a question that I'm asked a lot about, our rotation, and I understand that," Girardi said. "But, that question is not going to be answered, really, until we get into the middle of the season. I feel good about the guys that we have here in camp."

Burnett struggled to a 10-15 with a 5.26 ERA last season, lost seven of his last eight regular-season decisions.

"I know how disappointed he was about some of his starts last year," Girardi said. "I saw how it affected him. He's made adjustments already with (new pitching coach) Larry Rothschild. I know how much A.J. cares. I've just got a feeling in my gut that he's going to have a good year."

Sabathia, who had surgery for a small tear in his right knee last October, is 25 pounds lighter this spring training, weighing in at 290 pounds.

Cliff Lee's decision to sign with Philadelphia instead of New York has left the Yankees scrambling.

"It's disappointing, but you've got to respect him," Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner said. "He did what he wanted to do, that's the bottom line. We tried to get him harder than anybody. We offered him more money than anybody."

Steinbrenner thinks the Yankees have baseball's best bullpen following the addition of Rafael Soriano and Pedro Feliciano to go along with strong hitting and a solid defense.

"Our starting pitching, hopefully, will come around," Steinbrenner said. "We think A.J. will turn it around. All our baseball people like Nova, so we'll see what happens."

"I'm not going to pick who I think will be the best teams, but I think we're one of them," Steinbrenner added. "There's no use in predicting. You play the games for a reason, and you hope you don't have injuries."

Girardi expects shortstop Derek Jeter to improve on last season's .270 batting average. The team captain agreed to a $51 million, three-year contract in December.

"We signed him to be our shortstop and we signed him to be our leadoff hitter," Girardi said. "Will he want to prove to some people, maybe, that he's not a .280, .290 hitter, maybe. But I think he tries to prove that every year."

Notes: This is the first spring training since the death last July of Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. "It's going to be weird when you're sitting up in the box for the games," Hank Steinbrenner said. "The toughest part was the first month after he died. It had nothing to do with baseball. It was my dad." ... Former Yankees LHP David Wells is in camp for the first time as a spring training instructor. Lee Mazzilli is to report later to work with outfielders. ... Holdover spring instructors include Yogi Berra, Reggie Jackson, Rich Gossage and Ron Guidry. ... Numbers worn by Pettitte (46), Joe Torre (6), Paul O'Neill (21) and Bernie Williams (51) are not being used.

I.R.S. Watchdog Calls for Tax Code Overhaul

The various calls to revamp the nation’s highly complex tax code were joined by a significant new voice on Wednesday — the I.R.S.’s own taxpayer advocate, who urged that the system be rewritten for the first time in a generation

Nina E. Olson, the National Tax Advocate who acts as an ombudsman for the I.R.S., issued a sweeping criticism of federal tax policy in her annual report to Congress. Ms. Olson found that the volume of the tax code had doubled in size during the last decade — to 3.8 million words in February 2010 from 1.4 million in 2001. She estimated that Americans spent 6.1 billion hours preparing their returns each year — the equivalent of 3 million employees working full time. By comparison, the federal payroll has 2.1 million full-time workers.

The byzantine tax regulations also deprived the government of revenue by causing accidental underpayments and encouraging cheating, the report concluded, stating that the most practical remedy would be for Congress to scrap the existing code, which was last overhauled in 1986.

“The time for tax reform and tax simplification is now,” Ms. Olson said.

While the report amplifies many frequently voiced criticisms, and is likely to be welcomed by many of the tax critics who ignited the Tea Party movement, most policy experts consider it unlikely that the federal government will take up the issue before the 2012 presidential election.

Howard Gleckman, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center, has said that neither President Obama nor Congress has shown any eagerness to confront the combination of spending cuts and rate increases that would be needed to address the budget deficit.

Still, the fact that the I.R.S.’s own internal watchdog concedes that the federal tax system has become unmanageable underscores the severity of the problem.

The report’s prescriptions are likely to be more controversial than the diagnosis. Like the deficit commission set up by Mr. Obama, the National Tax Advocate’s office suggests that the tax system could be simplified and rates lowered if the federal government eliminated most of the $1.1 billion in write-offs, loopholes and deductions known as “tax expenditures.”

The report cites some of the most controversial loopholes for wealthy individuals and specific industries — including tax subsidies for electric cars and golf carts, movie production and a byproduct of the papermaking process known as “black liquor.” It also points out that some of the most expensive tax expenditures are collected by tens of millions of lower- and middle-class Americans who receive tax breaks on home mortgage interest, employer-provided health care plans, 401(k)’s and state and local taxes.

“The dirty little secret is that the largest special interests are us — the vast majority of U.S. taxpayers,” the report said. “Virtually all of us benefit from certain exclusions from income, deductions from income or tax credits.”

Unlike the deficit commission’s tax overhaul proposal, which sought to raise additional revenue, the taxpayer advocate’s plan would be revenue neutral.

The report also raised two troubling administrative issues facing the I.R.S. — the agency’s growing reliance on tax liens for collections and its greatly expanded responsibilities under the new health care law.

Noting that the I.R.S. had filed 1.1 million tax liens against delinquent taxpayers in 2010, the report urged the agency to use less “hard-core” enforcement tools on people who were still financially distressed because of the economic slowdown.

The taxpayer advocate also warned that as the new health care law takes effect in coming years, the I.R.S. would need to expand and retrain its staff.

“As the I.R.S. prepares to administer large portions of the health care legislation, it will have to shift from being an enforcement agency that primarily says, in effect, ‘you owe us’ to an agency that places much greater emphasis on hiring and training caseworkers to help eligible taxpayers receive benefits and work one-on-one with taxpayers to resolve legitimate disagreements,” the report said.