Warming up: Cashman, Yankees links, and Spring Training, baby!

For starters: More than four months after Curtis Granderson recorded the final out in Houston to end the Yankees' 2013 season, the Bombers are back on the field, doing baseball activities as a team for the first time in 2014. The new baseball season is upon us!

And with that comes a boatload of questions that need to be answered. We've asked a lot of them over the past couple of weeks here on the blog, but won't get answers for most of them until the spring is over.

This next question fall into the pile of ones that we won't know until the next offseason: is Brian Cashman in his final season as Yankees General Manager?

Entering the final year of his contract, my gut feeling is no, this won't be his last season, but a lot can between now and the next six or seven months.

Regardless of what many raging Yankees fans think, Cashman has been one of the better GM's in the game for more than a decade. He's always helped make sure that the Yankees are putting the best product on the field -- it's not his fault that he couldn't spend money last winter -- and for the most part, he's done a good job of doing that.

This offseason in particular, with the go-ahead from Hal Steinbrenner, he committed almost $500 million to Brian McCann, Jacoby Ellsbury, Carlos Beltran and Masahiro Tanaka.

This kind of spending spree is exactly what Yankees fans wanted, but if it doesn't work out, and those players turn out to be flops, then Cashman will be the man they blame. Unrightfully so, but it'll do down that way, regardless.

But Hal is not the kind of guy to point the finger and play the blame-game. He's not his father, rather to fire someone without hesitation.

It would take an absolutely terrible season from the Yankees to keep him from coming back. As long as the Yankees are able to get back to the playoffs after missing for the second time in two decades, the Hal won't have any trouble bringing Cashman back.

If he even wants to come back.....

Yankees links worth sharing:

* ESPNNewYork.com's Wallace Matthews wrote a post about Jeter being able to take a nice victory lap around the league in 2014 -- one that he truly deserves.

* Alex Rodriguez really wanted to be a member of the Boston Red Sox, and he almost was until the Players' Union stopped a trade from the Texas Rangers from ever happening, leaving to him eventually being traded to the Yankees. This ESPN 30for30 documents those events in the 2003-2004 offseason.

* A lot like the questions that have been asked by my this spring, including the one above, Matthews came up with 12 burning questions for the Yankees that need to be answered at some point.

* Another from ESPN New York: Ian O'Connor writes that making Tanaka out to be a "solid, consistent No. 3 starter" is not what the Yankees should be doing. They need him to be an ace, and very soon.

* Tanaka won't be the only Japanese star coming to spring training with the Yankees this year, as Hideki Matsui has accepted an invitation to be a guest instructor, reports the NY Post. That'll be a fun time.

Today's warmup song: "Enter Sandman" by Metallica. Just for old times sake, you know. I wanted to go with something else, but it just had to be done.

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Gavin Ewbank is the Lead Writer of Yanks Beat Blog, and you can follow him on Twitter (below).

Follow @GavinEwbank