The New York Yankees have replaced the Dallas Cowboys as the “America’s Team” people love to hate.
Of course, Yankees fans would be reveling in this hate if their team were still playing the way it did between 1996 and 2000, when the Yankees won four World Series championships. Instead, they’ve played like such losers since then (with the notable exception of their last championship in 2009) that they’re becoming even more of a punch line than the perennially hapless Chicago Cubs.
What Boss Steinbrenner’s money does buy: April through September. What it doesn’t buy: October, which apparently isn’t for sale at any price – even for close to a quarter-billion dollars.
(ESPN.com, October 10, 2006)
Not to mention the ridicule and humiliation Yankees fans are suffering over having their third-baseman, Alex Rodriguez, become the undisputed poster boy for the chronically overpaid, comically self-obsessed, and clinically juiced players in all professional sports.
No storyline in As the Yankees Turn provides more off-season fascination than watching the Yankees spend obscene amounts of money to lure the best players to New York only to have them play – during the critical October pennant race and World Series – as if they were bought with phony dollar bills. God knows they played this October like phony superstars who were bought with phony money….
(“Yankees Return to Their Losing Ways…,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 26, 2010)
And so it was yesterday that – with their final game of this season – the Yankees (with a team payroll of over $200 million) showed themselves, again, to be the biggest and most expensive losers in the history of sports. For as bad as it was in previous years for them to flame out during the critical October pennant race and World Series, they didn’t play well enough this year to even make it into the playoffs.
Indeed, the irony is that the only thing die-hard Yankees fans had to cheer about this year was the retirement of “Enter Sandman” Mariano Rivera (43) – their relief pitcher whose league record of 652 regular-season saves was surpassed only by his inimitable Zen-like character, which made him seem like a saint in a sport fielded by hedonists.
Apropos of retirement, the Yankees (fans and management alike) might derive some consolation from the looming 211-game suspension that will probably force the battered and disgraced Rodriguez (38) into retirement.
And, alas, recurring injuries are turning the team’s most popular player, Derek Jeter (39), into a shadow of himself. Therefore, iPINIONS thinks he’d do well to follow the Sandman’s lead and announce that next year will be his farewell season….
In any case, season-ending losses like this year’s excite unbridled schadenfreude in those of us who can’t stand the Yankees’ money-can-buy-us-anything attitude.
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