Yankees Prove Drugs and Money All It Takes These Days

I’ve always been what one would call a casual follower of baseball.  Being from Cleveland, I’ve endured my share of hardships brought on by the Indians, and this past season was no different.  In fact, this season was such a complete and utter disappointment that my interest in the entire MLB has dwindled about as much as has my interest in the Indians.  Still, though, the antics of certain MLB players and organizations over the past few years have managed to catch my eye now and again.  This year, it was the New York Yankees.

Now, I’ve never really liked the Yankees to begin with.  It’s pretty much common knowledge that George Steinbrenner was a greedy slug who would stop at nothing to put his fingers in as many players’ pies as he could reach.  As I said, I’m from Cleveland, so I’ve never had a real reason to love or hate the Yankees, but I can honestly say that, even as a child, my feelings towards that team were nothing short of dislike.  Maybe it was the bajillion people I saw walking around my hometown everyday wearing Yankees regalia, or maybe it was just the overall arrogance of the team and its fans, but for some reason I grew up loathing the bastards.  The thing was, though, that as a team they were more or less legit.  Derek Jeter was the face of that team in the nineties, and for all I can say about them, I do think that Jeter has always been a talented and rather upstanding player.  Joe Torre was a good manager, too, and after all, a manager can only work with the players he’s given.  They won a few Series when I was younger, and as much as I didn’t like to see it happen, life went on.  I endured the Indians’ crushing defeats in the ‘95 and ‘97 World Series and witnessed the subsequent downfall of the team under new management in the years to follow.  At the same time, I saw the beast that was the Yankees growing larger and uglier with each passing year.

The problem was that baseball salaries, which in years prior had been more or less the same as those of other sports, began to go so far through the roof that they wound up closer to the Moon than they were to the ground.  The Yanks hadn’t won a Series in a while, and since the Steinbrenner family had the money to throw around, they did just that.  They signed Alex Rodriguez to a contract which was, at the time, unheard of in the baseball world.  Essentially, they dangled such a big carrot in front of his nose that whatever choice he had in the matter vanished in the wake of many, many zeroes.  Eventually, other teams began to realize the lesson that the Steinbrenners had already learned: if you want to win games, you have to get your hands on players of A-Rod’s caliber, and to do so, you need money.  All of a sudden it didn’t matter what kind of talent a team already had, or what kind of track record they boasted.  If they didn’t have the money to wave in a player’s face, they weren’t going to get their star.  The Indians, in losing players like Jim Thome and Manny Ramierez to enormous offers from other teams, ironically helped to make this theory into scientific fact.

The salary problem has only been getting worse.  Why do we see the same teams in the playoffs year after year?  They’re the teams with the cash to keep their good players around and pick up better ones along the way: teams like Boston, the LA Angels, and of course, the Yankees.  In the last offseason, the Yankees inked two major free agents to ridiculously huge, multi-HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR contracts: Mark Texiera and C.C. Sabathia.  C.C. was, as many of you might recall, a part of the Indians orginization for quite a while.  The year before he was set to go into free agency, he went into a slump, and the Tribe wound up trading him to Milwaukee, who he immediately led to the playoffs in an astounding turnaround.  Coincidence?  Well, given the fact that the Yanks were waiting for him at the end of the year with a check bigger than A-Rod’s head, I don’t think so.  This is not a singular occurrence: many baseball players, nearing free agency or not, will play poorly simply for the prospect of winding up on a different team which will pay them more money.  Essentially, the Indians have, one way or another, lost most of the good players who have come through the orginization to bigger contracts (the exceptions being Cliff Lee and Victor Martinez, who were lost as a result of the Tribe’s front office smoking way too much crack).

The ironic part of all of this is that it’s a big, vicious circle: teams with big payrolls win games, attracting fans who will support even bigger payrolls that will be used on better player who will win more games, thus attracting more fans… and it goes on and on.  Why do you think teams like Kansas City continue to stay at the bottom of the barrel?  Because they don’t have the fans to make them the money to buy better players than the ones they’ve got.  The few stars of the orginization, like Zach Greinke, won’t be around long.  They’ll be lured away by vast amounts of money just like everyone else.

Of course, the Yankees have handed the city of New York a financial black hole in the form of their new, one-and-a-half billion dollar (yeah, that’s “billion,” with a “b”) stadium.  Ticket prices there were at one point as high as twenty-six hundred dollars a SEAT in the first few rows.  The entire STATE will lose up to 7.5 million dollars annually in taxes to finance the parking garages ALONE.  Somehow, the Yankees managed to spend this much money on a venue that’s actually SMALLER than their last stadium, at least in terms of the size of the field, which of course means that steroid-juiced A-Rod will have an area about the size of a back yard to smack the ball around in.  With the new Mets stadium having gone up in the same year, I don’t see how the city is going to avoid financial problems down the road.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the recent steroid scandals have highlighted another major facet of MLB orginizations: teams will stop at nothing, no matter how dishonest, to win a World Series.  No matter how many people, including influential members of the media, decry the recent wave of cheating that has struck the sport, there are far too many teams with media lapdogs willing to deflect attention away from such players as the aforementioned Alex “A-Roid” Rodriguez.  For all we know, he could still be shooting it up; baseball teams have, until recently, been notoriously good at hiding what goes on behind the scenes, and the Yankees, with their willingness to pay any amount of money necessary to win, certainly have what it takes.  True, the Yankees aren’t the only team that has been experiencing these problems, but they do seem the least concerned, still fielding players like A-Rod and Andy Pettite and countless others who are all probably users (the exception being Joba Chamberlain, who sucks so hard he had to have his jaw replaced, and yet is still making hundreds of millions of dollars playing for the Yankees.  Money is clearly no object.).

Add all this up and you have the perfect formula for a World Series-winning team.  Now, to be slightly fair, the Phillies didn’t exactly bring their A-game.  While the Yankees may be a team full of users, the Phillies are merely a team full of douchebags who can’t perform consistently to save their lives.  Chase Utley, who was a veritable cannon for most of the Series, decided to fold the tent in Game 6, and Ryan Howard never even got his pitched.  The Phillies pitching staff, with the exception of Cliff Lee, is a joke; Pedro Martinez looks like a washed up, overweight 80’s throwback (what the hell is with that hair?), and Cole Hamels is one of the MLB’s biggest choke artists.  This, plus the myriad of questionable calls by umpires throughout the Series and the rest of the playoffs (I’m no conspiracy theorist, but if you don’t think that baseball teams have been paying off the MLB to NOT introduce instant replay to the game, you need to take another look at the tapes) has resulted in what was basically a championship gift-wrapped for the Yankees to celebrate the veritable orgy of spending that they have undertaken in the past year.

As I said, I was never a very avid follower of baseball.  However, I still at least maintained an interest in the game, even when Cleveland was having one of its many off-years.  However, with the recent Yankees championship win, I am fully disillusioned with the sport.  New York has proven that baseball has transformed from a sport to a disreputable business that everyone chooses to frequent anyways because it’s entertaining and popular.  Until the MLB, including Bud Selig and friends, takes steps to put teams like the Yankees in their place, seasons will continue to end predictably with the teams who have spent the most money both on players and cover-ups taking home an increasingly meaningless trophy.