COMMENTARY : Yankees pay for oversized expectations
Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006
This is why people hate the New York Yankees. It’s not their winning tradition or commitment to excellence. People like to align themselves with winners. It’s not that.
It’s not their players. People who wouldn’t use a Yankees umbrella if slogging through a tropical storm respect and admire Derek Jeter, Yogi Berra and Lou Gehrig.
What they detest is the Yankees’ sense of entitlement and arrogance.
The Yankees don’t lose gracefully or graciously. Hours after the Tigers ended the Yankees’ season, eliminating them from the playoffs as Yankees past have eliminated others, the New York Daily News reported George Steinbrenner wanted to fire Joe Torre and replace him with Lou Piniella. When New York pundits weren’t reporting of or calling for Torre’s firing, they were opining it is time to run Alex Rodriguez out of town.
After an entire team’s bats disintegrate, somebody must swing from the foul pole, fair or not.
Then there was the written public statement Steinbrenner made Sunday in which he called this a “sad failure.”
In other quarters it is known as... a loss.
After 76 years of accumulating wisdom you’d think Steinbrenner would’ve learned of this dirty little secret: In every game somebody must lose for the other team to win, and sometimes that losing team will be the Yankees.
The Yankees are the rich prepschool kids, given every advantage in life, who cannot accept it when the hard-working public school kid scores better on the SAT.
Did Torre manage his best playoff series ? No. He shouldn’t have started Jaret Wright instead of Cory Lidle in Game 4, particularly against a lineup that thrives on fastballs as much as the Tigers. He shouldn’t have relieved his ace, Chien-Ming Wang, after he’d retired six consecutive batters and thrown only 93 pitches in Game 1. He shouldn’t have sat Gary Sheffield for Bernie Williams in Game 3.
But the Yankees didn’t lose for these reasons (Jim Leyland made a couple strategic blunders, too ). They mostly lost because Kenny Rogers and Jeremy Bonderman pitched career games to shut them down. In Randy Johnson and Wright, the Yankees lacked the starters to win those games.
In short, they lost because on these days the Tigers were better.
Deal with it. Lots of other teams do.
Because from 1996-2000 the Yankees won an astonishing four World Series in five years (and came one Mariano Rivera blown save from making it five out of six ), their perspective warped like a Dali painting. It was a fantastic run, but also surreal.
In this wild-card era in which teams must win three series — against opponents in which the talent difference (if not payroll ) is often minimal — we may never see another baseball dynasty like that in our lifetimes.
The truth is the best team in the regular season more often than not doesn’t win the World Series.
Spending about $ 1 billion on player payroll as Steinbrenner has the past six seasons gets you into the playoffs but can’t guarantee a ring fitting. To think otherwise demonstrates incredible hubris.
Steinbrenner is a terrific owner because he cares much more about accruing championships than dollars, but no other team thinks of winning as their birthright.
The Yankees think they can remove competition from the sport.
Lovers of sport would hate that more than the Yankees.
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