How could the Yankees not win?

ARTICLE: Hoping $243.5 Million of Pitching Will Go Far, By TYLER KEPNER, New York Times, October 6, 2009

A sign of nearly everything that's wrong with baseball: the question, Can the Yanks win the World Series with this nearly quarter of a billion dollars in acquired pitching talent?

That plus steroids is why I gave up on baseball years ago.

Where the NFL does better: the salary gap and the--until recently by those nasty Vike linemen--the strict line on drug testing. Please keep Jerry Jones at bay!

Comments

[stuart abrams]

I'm disappointed - I thought you were a free-marketeer. The economics of baseball and football can never be the same. First, the baseball schedule is such that you will never have weekend television extravaganzas, so revenue sharing is much less feasible. Second, since baseball is mostly played in the summer, it will never be a big college sport, so professional teams have to fund their own minor leagues (the NFL has the NCAA to do it for them). Finally, there is the nature of the 2 games. Baseball is unique in that it is a team sport in which success is determined by individual skills. And, as I have discussed with my med student daughter, the physical skills required to be a major league baseball star are very unusual. Pitching is one of the most unnatural things a human body can do. Fielding and hitting require extraordinary combinations of reflex and hand-eye coordination. Very little success in baseball, at least at the major league level, can be achieved just through strength and muscle memory. These factors manifest themselves in the phenomenon of the Yankees - the most hated and respected professional organization in the history of sports. There is nothing really comparable in any other sport, and IMO, that makes other sports much less interesting. The Yankees can lose, and part of the thrill of baseball is waiting for it to happen.

[Hal O'Brien]

Hey, it's the 13-time World-Series-losing Yankees, who have yet to win a Series in this century. Of course they can lose -- heck, half the fun of baseball is finding out how the Yankees will choke this year.

[Hal O'Brien]

Or, to elaborate the point:

You could make a list of "The Ten Best World Series of All Time" -- and in every single one, the Yankees lose. With three left over as "honorable mentions."

I'm not even sure that would be inaccurate. ;)