Truth be told, this title does not do justice to the groundhog-day nature of what has become the New York Yankees’ fall classic of futility. But you don’t have to be a baseball fan to marvel at this curious thing:
- Never before in the field of professional sports has a team paid so much to win so little.
They have now lost with the team they were sure they could finally win with, 11 years from their last World Series, after one World Series title in the last two decades. They had Gerrit Cole, on whom they had lavished a $324 million contract, the richest in history, to start the game, [and] their closer Aroldis Chapman, on whom they have lavished the richest closer contract in history, on the mound in a tie game in the bottom of the 8th. And they lost to a team from Tampa that, compared to them, at least payroll-wise, is a Mom and Pop operation.
(New York Daily News, October 10, 2020)
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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Okay, so they finally made it to the playoffs this year. But that seems cold consolation after getting eliminated in the first round.
Indeed, the most interesting feature of this fall classic is that it’s more often than not a “Mom and Pop” team that eliminates the conglomerate that is the Yankees. This vindicates the allusion to Moneyball that I’ve been making for years.
I have a long-standing and well-documented affinity for underdogs. Therefore, the only thing that can give me greater satisfaction this baseball season is watching the Tampa Bay Rays follow up their humiliation of the Yankees in the playoffs by defeating the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.
If the pandemic upended the traditions of home-field advantage and rabid crowd support — and prompted baseball to expand its playoff field — it didn’t lead to a watered-down World Series. The Dodgers, with one of baseball’s biggest payrolls, had the best record in the sport’s abbreviated 60-game season. The Rays, with one of baseball’s smallest payrolls, had the second-best record.
(The Washington Post, October 19, 2020)
But, apropos of groundhog day, while the Dodgers and Rays play out this fall classic, the Yankees will begin playing out what has become their fall classic: searching for more superstars to lure onto their roster of autumnal futility by offering them obscene amounts of money.
In any event, in the spirit of groundhog day, I can do no better than to reprise the way I ended last year’s commentary on this fall classic. This, not least because I had the foresight to highlight the Rays as the Mom and Pop team to watch. Here is how this played out in “October Woes Continue for the Yankees. Time to Play ‘Moneyball’,” October 24, 2019:
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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.
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Go Rays!
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