Trust me, you don’t have to like baseball to marvel at this curious thing: never before in the field of professional sports has a team paid so much to win so little.
New York’s season-ending defeat to the Houston Astros in the American League Championship Series on Saturday means that for the first time since the 1910s, they have gone a full calendar decade without so much as appearing in the World Series.
They spent more than $2 billion on player salaries, more than any other team in the majors over that span. … They have become the sort of franchise their fans used to mock: great in every way but the one that counts.
(The Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2019)
As it happens, I commented on this futility in real time in “Forget World Series, Yankees Can’t Even Win/Buy Berth into Playoffs,” September 13, 2013:
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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.
(“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.
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The Washington Nationals defeated the Houston Astros last night to take a 2-0 lead in their best of 7 games for this year’s World Series title. But, as they play out this fall classic, the Yankees will begin playing out what has become their fall classic: offering obscene amounts of money to lure superstars onto their roster of autumnal futility.
But perhaps the dawn of a new decade will inspire a new approach. Because only the Einsteinian definition of insanity explains the Yankees continuing to do that same old thing.
Mind you, only God knows what it’s going to take for them to break this spell. After all, based on the number of games they won during each regular season, the Yankees were arguably the best team in MLB even during that lost decade.
This is why I feel constrained to reiterate my suspicion that they are in the incipient throes of a curse. Moreover, I fear it will surpass the one that plagued the Boston Red Sox for 86 years until they finally won another World Series in 2004.
In which case, the Yankees would do well to emulate the “Moneyball” Oakland A’s of 2002. They should try to win as many games as possible with players who cost as little as possible.
This means an opening day payroll closer to the Tampa Bay Rays’ $54 million than the $206 million they had this year, respectively. For a little perspective, the Nats and Astros made it to this year’s World Series with payrolls of $161 million and $160 million, respectively.
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