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When Joe Girardi opened camp last month, he made it clear that the fifth-starter job would be a wide-open competition. And so it was that Phil Hughes, a 23-year-old once deemed too promising to be dealt for Johan Santana and Joba Chamberlain, a 24-year-old once touted as the next Josh Beckett, ended up in a dogfight with the very ordinary likes of Sergio Mitre, Chad Gaudin, and Alfredo Aceves. Or at least that's how the Yankees presented it. The reality of the situation is that the fix was in from the start. The Yankees needed Joba or Hughes to win the gig; if they both failed it would be an indictment of the entire operation. This made the Mitre-Gaudin-Ace troika paper contenders, as fake as the color of John Sterling's hair. This was always about the Golden Boys, even if the Yankees woul ...

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Article written by Dan Hanzus