Last night, in the house that Jeter built, the New York Yankees won a long-awaited berth into the World Series by defeating the Los Angeles Angels 5-2 to win the American League Championship Series, four games to two.
Of course, any team would be happy to brag about winning 40 league pennants and 26 World Series championships – as the Yankees have, and any player would be happy to brag about being on seven World Series teams – as Derek Jeter and a couple other current players can.
But what makes this a quest for redemption is that no team in history has paid so much to accomplish so little than Yankees have done since their last pennant in 2003. And this is why I have duly mocked their spectacular failures, in part, as follows:
No storyline in the soap opera ‘As the Yankees Turn’ provides more yearly fascination than watching Steinbrenner 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 (and were just giving him what he paid for…).
[Fall classic: the Yankees lose again...! TIJ, October 10, 2007]
Therefore, as I congratulate the Yankees on winning the pennant this year, I feel constrained to remind their fans that failure still looms as the Bronx “bomber” try now to dethrone the defending World Series Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies.
Because let there be no doubt that, with a billion dollars invested in players’ salaries, winning the pennant, but losing the World Series will make this just another fall classic of spectacular failure for the New York Yankees….
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