The scale of the Yankees’ spending long ago lost its ability to shock. Take the fact that Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, and Derek Jeter are collectively earning $67.7 million this year. That’s more than the total payroll of nine different teams, among them some very good clubs like the Cleveland Indians and the San Diego Padres. This probably doesn’t surprise you. The important thing is that the Yankees spend an absurd amount of money, and everything past that is mere detail. This is more than understandable, and on balance it’s doubtless a good thing.

Roger Clemens’s one-year, $28 million contract has, partly because of this dynamic and partly because he’ll be paid only a prorated portion of it, been received fairly nonchalantly. This makes sense. Casual Yankees fans don’t and shouldn’t really care how much he’s being paid; the important thing is that their team got a great pitcher. Hardcore fans don’t and shouldn’t really care, either; they care about big salaries insofar as they commit the Yankees to players in decline or prevent them from getting players they want, but a one-year deal for Clemens, no matter how rich, won’t affect the Yankees past this year.

Still, the size of the deal is very significant. Top pitcher salaries have been remarkably stable for many years; Clemens’s deal might change that.

Last year, after sitting out spring training and the first two months of the season, Clemens joined up with the Houston Astros on a prorated contract that worked out to $22 million over a full season, which at the time was the highest salary any pitcher had ever been paid. The point to note, though, was that it was basically in line with other top pitcher salaries. Mike Mussina was the highest paid pitcher in baseball last year and in 2005, earning $19 million each year. Last year, the second highest paid pitcher was Andy Pettitte, at $16.4 million, and the third highest paid pitcher was Randy Johnson, at $15.7 million. In 2005, Clemens, at $18 million, and Johnson, at $16 million, were the second and third highest paid pitchers.

In that context, $22 million wasn’t a notably high figure. To oversimplify things, salaries for top ballplayers are measured against what other top ballplayers are making. Clemens could reasonably have been judged the best pitcher in baseball last year, depending on what criteria you were using, and he was certainly the best available one. A salary a few million above what the highest paid pitcher in the game was making sounds just about right, especially when you consider his unique status as a gate attraction in Houston and so on.

Twenty eight million dollars is not just an awful lot of money but a much higher figure than $22 million. To put it in perspective, the highest paid pitchers in baseball this year are Pettitte and Anaheim’s Bartolo Colon, each of whom will be making $16 million, and the Dodgers’ Jason Schmidt, who will be making $15.7 million. (San Francisco’s Barry Zito signed a deal with an annual average salary of $18 million over the winter but isn’t making near that this year.) Last year, Clemens’s nominal salary was 63% of what the top two pitchers in the game were making; this year, that figure is 88%.

There’s no reason to begrudge Clemens this money. If someone’s willing to pay him this much, he’s earned it, by definition. Nor is there any reason to scowl at the Yankees for spending it. This is a business decision. Clemens will either bring in more money than he’s being paid, and it will thus prove to have been a good decision, or he won’t, and it will thus prove to have been a poor one.

It isn’t, though, a decision that takes place in a vacuum. Before this deal was struck, the logic was that elite pitching talent like Johan Santana should be paid around $19-$22 million a year. Now that figure looks more like $22-$28 million. That’s not inherently a bad thing; Santana should be paid according to his worth. But it does exert tremendous pressure on middle class teams. Minnesota has a $71 million payroll this year; it’s conceivable that they could rationally decide to sign Santana for $20 million a year when he becomes a free agent. It’s not conceivable that they could decide to sign him for $28 million a year — and it’s also inconceivable that his agents wouldn’t point to Clemens’s salary and make the case that Santana is a better pitcher and thus deserves to be paid at least well.

To the extent that players like Clemens and Santana are anomalous, the Rocket’s new deal isn’t going to alter the landscape all by itself. By raising the bar so high, though, and thus setting a new precedent for top salaries, it’s inevitably going to have an impact that will price even some fairly wealthy teams out of the market for the game’s best pitchers. The Yankees won’t be hurt; a game that’s riding a sustained period of parity to unprecedented popularity, though, might be. Are the Yankees to blame? Not really. But if your ear is getting bent by some poor Twins fan griping about the unfairness of it all, keep in mind that he’s not entirely wrong.

tmarchman@nysun.com