Yankeenomics

I know it’s January and you are not thinking about baseball.

Still, I would encourage you to get a head start on your Yankee hating for the ’08 season.

Why? Well, first of all, you shouldn’t need a new reason. The dozens of old ones are good enough.

But if you’re wavering, try this: The Yankees’ payroll last year (tops, naturally) was a whopping $218 million.

That’s a tad under $63 million ahead of the next biggest spender, the Boston Red Sox, who paid out $155 million. More effectively, I might add, since they won the World Series.

The Yanks did try to hold their payroll under $200 million last year, but that late signing of Roger Clemens pushed them over the top. (No word on whether the Rocket’s pharmaceutical bill figured into that.)

The NFL and NBA have tried to equalize team spending (in different ways) to give each team at least a chance of winning the Big Enchilada.

The player’s union has prevented Major League Baseball from doing something similar. And, to be fair, stupid owners keep shelling out ever-bigger bucks to marginal players.

But something is terribly wrong in a sport where the payroll gap between the No. 1 team (the Bronx Bombers) and the No. 3 team (the L.A. Dodgers, hardly a small-market squad) is an astounding $92 million.

What could be sillier? Try the two teams at the bottom of the totem pole:

-- Florida Marlins, $33.1 million. It’s hard to imagine they actually won a World Series a few years ago. In the off-season, they shipped their last two good players — Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera — to the Tigers.

-- Tampa Bay Rays, $31.8 million. They changed their name from the Devil Rays to the Rays because of all those negative vibes with the D-word. They should have played a little with the letter “A” and changed their name to the Last-Place Rays.

The thirtysomething million spent by each of those two teams is what the Yankees toss away for a single player. I’d love to see the Rays win the AL East over the Yankees, but that’s about as likely as Barry Bonds admitting he hit all those moonshots with a little help from his friends.

Oh, well. Hang in there, baseball fans. The first day of spring training is Feb. 14.