Not "That" but "Why"

I don't hate that the Yankees win. I hate why they win.

I don't hate that the Yankees have so many fans. I hate why they have so many fans.

Hate is even too strong of a word. Better, I find it wrong that these two things take place.

1. I don't hate that the Yankees win. I hate why they win.

The Yankees win because they have more resources than anyone else. As I have discussed, the Yankees are not exceptional managers of their talent. They have wasted tens of millions of dollars on players who get hurt, suck, cheat, are not worth their investment (Giambi, Igawa, Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano etc.).

But these shortcomings don't faze the Yankees like they would 3/4 of major league baseball teams. This is because the Yankees play in a different financial galaxy. They outspend the other teams in baseball by so much that they naturally will put a team on the field with superior talent.

In the short term, in baseball more than all sports, a team with more talent can lose. You saw this when the Yankees slumped through the first two months of the seasons. And you have seen it in their many postseason failures over the course of the new millenium.

But in the long term, the Yankees will be the game's best. With no salary cap in place the Yankees can simply keep plugging holes with superior talent. They can invest more in free agency and of more recent importance, in the draft, where this year like many in the past, the Yankees selected a player, Andrew Brackmen, a top 5 talent at the 30th pick, because other teams did not want to pay him the hefty demand that his agent Scott Boras would demand.

I don't hate the Yankees for winning. I hate them for why they win.

I don't hate the Patriots or the Spurs. If I were a Jet fan, I might hate the Patriots as my rival. For these reasons I loathe the Phillies and the Braves. But these teams all play within a system that the rest of their sport plays in.

Salary caps balance sports. Teams that happen to excel at managing the salary cap, I can only applaud. The Knicks can not, and they are an embarassment. But to just have more money does not make you a better organization. It just makes you a more winning organization.

This is why I do not like the Yankees. I think it's the cheap way to win. (Ed's note: Not literally, of course).

I don't hate that the Yankees have so many fans. I hate why they have so many fans.

Growing up in the 80's the Yankees were a joke. Their teams failed and no one cared. In the mid-late 90's, the Yankees got good and the fans jumped.

I'm human. I know that fans love winners and more people will come to games when a team is winning.

But it is the MAJOR jump over the past 5 years, once the Yankees were already the best team in baseball, but after the Yanks started to really show flex their financial superiority that bothers me.

In 1992, when the Yankees were stumbling, the team averaged an abysmal 21,589 fans per game, 11th in the American League.

In 1996, the year the Yankees first became New York's sweethearts, the Yankees averaged 27,789 fans per game.

In 2000, the year of their fourth championship, the Yankees averaged 37,956 fans per game.

In 2004, when the Yankees had cemented themselves as a $200,000,000 payroll team, the Yankees averaged 46,609 fans per game.

In 2007, with an all-star team en toute, the Yankees average 52,330 fans per game. (Numbers courtesy of Baseball Prospectus)

These jumps are staggering. I don't even really know what to think of them. I guess it never really bothered me when the Yankees got popular in the late 90's. They were winning a lot after New York had not seen a winner in almost 15 years. "Non-fans" became "fans" and "casual fans" became "excited fans."

It happens.

But the jump over the last couple of years is what bothers me, and why I don't like Yankee fans.

Over the last 5 years, the Yankees have truly differentiated themselves from the game of baseball.

In 2002 the Yankees had a payroll of $138.5 Mil. But 5 other teams(Red Sox, Diamondbacks, Mets, Texas, Dodgers) were all above $100 mil.

The Yankees were outspending, but not to the point where it was nuts.

In 2007, the Yankees have a payroll of $196 mil. While the Sox have jumped to $140, the other five 9-figure payroll teams below them have not changed, all floating around $100 million.

Here in lies my problem.

I don't like the financial disparity. That is obvious.

But I really don't like how this financial disparity correlates with a major increase in attendance and popularity. The Yankees average almost 15,000 more fans per game than they did at their peak of success in 2000. That new fans support this egregrious error in baseball disgusts me.

People supporting a monopoly.

So yet again, the "Yankee basher" Sip has talked over the last couple of weeks of how the Yankees are again the best team in baseball, and his millions of fans have been irked by this "soft stance" from the "tough" Mets fan.

That the Yankees are winning now doesn't shock me or even bother me because it is so obvious and expected. In the long run, over a 162 game season, this team will be here everytime.

But, as the increments get smallers, 40 games to go in the season, 7 games in a playoff series, this is when the Yankees "edge" gets smaller and smaller.

And this is when it gets fun to really get involved.

Vaya,
Sip