So what have we learned? The team with advantages at every level and in every aspect of development wins. What could be more anti-climatic than that? It's as if we put a marble on a three-legged table and got excited about it rolling off the lowest side.
I'm not the first, last or loudest to bemoan this year's World Series purchase. I'm just amused by the response. Don't blame the Yankees; they're playing by the rules and doing everything they can to win. You'd want your team to do the same thing.
That's precisely the point. By the rules of Major League Baseball, it's the Yankees' league and everyone else gets to play in it. Allowing the team in the largest market with the deepest tradition and the most money to exploit its position to the exclusion of almost everyone else is uninteresting, unfair, and detrimental to the long-term interest of the sport. The Yankees have played in 40 of the 86 World Series since 1923. Even Yankee fans should be sick of them.
Listen to Yankee fans themselves. They reminisce about the last championship, as if it were eons ago. They wail about the long drought. It's been eight years, during which time they reached the World Series twice and the playoffs seven times. Good god, even Moses waited 40 years, and he didn't have a DH.
Baseball desperately needs a mechanism to level the playing field -- at all levels of the game -- or risk losing fans in all those cities that haven't sniffed the championship for a generation.
b
No comments:
Post a Comment