Rebuilding an Empire State

The New York Yankees say they didn’t spend much time lamenting their playoff loss to the Angels last year, and they don’t come into Anaheim today looking for revenge.

They don’t think in such small terms. They’re too busy assaulting the rest of the league and those teams that came before them, too set on challenging the lofty standards of their own history.

The Yankees are 16-3, the best start ever for this storied franchise that played its first game 100 years ago today. Their starting rotation’s record of 14-0 is the longest winning streak to begin a season in the modern era; the previous best was by the 1944 St. Louis Browns, who went 12-0.

The Yankees are doing more than winning; they’re beating teams into submission. They have hit 39 home runs -- their most ever at this stage -- and allowed only five. They just completed a four-game sweep of Minnesota in which they outscored the Twins, 38-9.

The Angels aren’t a nemesis or a target. They’re simply the next team on the schedule.

“It’s another regular-season game,” catcher Jorge Posada said. “Whatever happens, happens. Right now, we’ve got to keep playing the way we’re playing. We can’t think about what happened last year. It happened.

“We’ve been playing good baseball right now. Nothing’s changed because we’re facing the Anaheim Angels.”

David Wells said the bitterness ended as soon the plane landed in New York on the return trip from their season-ending loss at Edison Field.

“It’s something you just can’t dwell on,” said Wells, the winning pitcher in Monday’s 15-1 victory over Minnesota. “For me, it’s something that ... we got beat and that’s just the bottom line. It’s something that we have to move on. We can’t worry about it. We have to regroup and get ready for the next season.”

For the Yankees, regrouping means reloading. They went global with the free-agent signings of slugger Hideki Matsui from Japan and pitcher Jose Contreras from Cuba.

It also meant that owner George Steinbrenner returned to hands-on mode (George Costanza, beware). The latest and most public manifestation of Steinbrenner’s grip on the reins was shown over the weekend, when Manager Joe Torre told Contreras that he would be sent down to triple-A Columbus. Steinbrenner decided that Contreras would be better served by reporting to the Yankees’ minor league complex in Tampa, Fla.

Torre didn’t like having his authority usurped and his word undone in that manner, and he let reporters know about it. That was chum for the tabloids. (“Smokin’ Joe!” “Cuban Pitcher Crisis!” screamed the back pages.)

Meanwhile, the Yankees kept rolling along, as if completely unaware of the whole issue.

“What thing with George and Joe?” center fielder Bernie Williams said. “I don’t even want to know, man.

“It comes down to the results on the field. That’s what’s most important here, trying to make sure that we play the way we’re supposed to play out there. Over the years, that has been the key here. Play, letting it all out on the field and making sure the distractions don’t bother us.”

So if the typical Bronx Zoo controversies don’t get to them, then neither have potentially devastating injuries that cost them the services of their heart and soul, shortstop Derek Jeter, and the game’s best closer, Mariano Rivera.

“We’ve been playing well,” Wells said. “We feel like we can go out and beat any team at any time.”

They expected to roll through the Angels last year too. But the upstart Angels rally monkeyed their way back to win the final three games of the division series.

“You go out and you don’t make good pitches, you’re going to get knocked around,” said Yankee pitcher Andy Pettitte, who allowed eight hits and four runs in three innings in Game 2 last fall. “We didn’t pitch real good in that series. That’s just the bottom line.”

Went it was over, Pettitte went back to his ranch in south Texas and paid as little attention as possible to the rest of postseason play. It was nice, a little bit, that the Angels went ahead and won the World Series. At least the Yankees could say they were knocked out by the champs. And they came away pretty impressed by the Angels.

“They play the game,” Pettitte said. “They don’t hurt themselves. They’ve got some guys that threw real good for them, they’ve got some young guys that came up and threw the ball good for them, which is tough to do in a playoff situation. They put the ball in play. As far as their lineup, they’re a tough lineup to face.”

But there’s a difference between a champion and a dynasty. There’s a reason the Yankees were the dominant team of the 1990s and are still a force to be reckoned with in the new century.

“We’ll go all the way this year,” outfielder Raul Mondesi said. “We’ve got a great team. I don’t want to say, 100%, but with the team we have right now, we’ve got a good chance.”

He put on the pants to his shiny blue suit, then dug in his pocket, pulled out a pair of rings and slipped them on. They were very bling-blingy, but they weren’t the World Series variety.

Those are in Anaheim, where the 2002 championship banner flies, whether the Yankees want to dwell on it or not.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

WHERE THE YANKEES RANK

Yankees and their American League rankings in some batting and pitching statistics:

*--* BATTING Statistic Rank Batting average 302 1 Slugging percentage 551 1 On-base percentage 388 1 Runs 134 1 Total bases 374 1 Home runs 39 1 Runs batted in 131 1

*--*

*--* PITCHING Statistic Rank ERA 3.12 2 Home runs 5 1 Runs 60 2 Earned runs 59 2 Walks 47 1 Strikeouts 153 1 Shutouts 3 1

*--*