THE CURSE:

The date was October 26h, 2000. Maybe the worst day of my life. I watched my beloved Mets lose to the Yankees, the team i hated more than anything in the world, in the biggest series of my life.

Yankee Fans celebrated yet another championship like it was just another day in the old ballpark. I wanted to kill them all.

Little did they know, things were about to change. These Yankee teams of the late 90's were the brainwork of Gean Michael. Michael developed a core of young talent from within the organization (Jeter, Williams, Rivera, Pettite, Posada) and surrounded it with some key veterans (O'neill, Clemens) to assemble a well balanced TEAM from top to bottom.

I highlight team for a reason. This was the last year that the Yankees ever had one.

After 2000, things changed.

The 2000 offseason was the famed offseason that saw Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez and Derek Jeter combine to earn $601 million in guaranteed contracts. The big spending in baseball ignited "The BOSS" to finally open up and show off how big his pocketbook was.

That offseason the yanks went and threw $17 mil per year at Mike Mussina. This was really their first ever huge free agent signing. You may remember that Clemens was obtained for Wells. O'neill for Roberto Kelly. Most Yankee moves for that matter were done on a pretty similar scale to everyone else in baseball.

The 2000 offseason is when the Yankees became "The Evil Empire."

Over the next four years, the yankees bought every player in town. Giambi, Sheffield, A-Rod, Randy Johnson. Look at this list and you could almost gasp.

There was an onion article back in '03 that joked, " The yankees guarantee the world series by signing every player in sports." Well all of a sudden they had.

No longer did they have to fight to make the playoffs. They had to make the playoffs. After all, they had an all star team.

They took baseball and made it unfair. There was the Yankees and the rest. They had a payroll in 2005 that outpaid the bottom 1/6 of baseball teams combined.

Do I care about their payroll...no

It just gives me one more reason to hate them. More so, it makes rooting for this team a little bit sad.

See the beauty of sports is like the beauty of a lottery ticket. When you buy that lottery ticket, you play some lucky #'s and then you think to yourself, what if? If i win i can buy a new house, my life will be set, i can buy a new car, i can take care of my family. All these dreams, even if they seem real for only a short time help build the best feeling you can possibly have...hope.

Sports does the same thing. For an entire year, I sit there and hope that the mets will be great. Every single game means something to me. This hope brings my friends together. For Yankee Fans this hope does not exist. Over the course of a 162 game season the Yankees will make the playoffs every time. And if not everytime, they will certainly be in it come September. With these expectations, Yankee fans lose the joy of hoping for 11 months of a season, which to me is really sad.

So i started this blog because i now believe the Yankees are cursed. They have taken away the purity of baseball, turned their fans into monsters who sit there and think of Arod and Randy Johnson as their own, and they have taken away 1/4 of the al playoff spots for as long as baseball holds their current salary structure.

The Curse of the Mighty Dollar. They are cursed for turning baseball into a game of money and not grass and dirt.

I will be updating this blog often, bashing the yankees, their fans, their players and just about everything about them.

Enjoy,

Sippy Momo