originally posted october 12, 2004

goliath vs. goliath

"Bart Simpson?! According to this, you're not due to arrive until the next time the Yankees win the pennant. That's nearly a century from now."
-- The Devil, in The Simpsons episode "Bart Gets Hit by a Car," aired January 10, 1991

The climactic series of Major League Baseball starts tonight at 8:00. For the 54th time this season, the Yankees and Red Sox will square off before a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. There are those who'll root for one team or the other, and there are those who'll root against a team they consider to be the "Evil Empire." Don't they mean "the greater of two evils"?

lifer

As the son of two Bronxites, I was raised to be a Yankees fan. I vividly remember attending games in the Bronx when the Yankees were a bunch of scrubs, 13 years removed from their last championship and fighting to avoid another last-place finish. I remember rooting for teams with such no-name workaday players as Kevin Maas, Jesse Barfield, and everybody's sixth-chance favorite Steve Howe. My favorite player at the time, Don Mattingly, is now revered by fans who know he stands a slim chance of even staying on next year's Hall of Fame ballot.

So when the Yankees started winning, and spending, they became the bad guys. The only antidote for a winning team: spend a ton of money and get the media to hype you up as a little scrappy team that just might win it all.

damn yankees

I work at a small company in Pittsburgh, which was last known as a baseball powerhouse in the early '90s as the Yankees couldn't give box seats away. Twelve losing seasons later, the Pirates have a fantastic ballpark but a paucity of fans to sit in it. Yet at my office the team of choice is never the Buccos but rather the Sox. Many of my co-workers speak with utter disdain about the Yanks and support the Red Sox as the only team that has a chance to beat this $180 million powerhouse.

So who won the World Series last year?

How many curses did the scrappy little Florida Marlins have to overcome to beat the Yankees in six games?

How much complaining did Hollywood stars from Miami need to do so that everyone would be aware of the Marlins' plight?

None. The Marlins played well and they have rings to show for it. Yet nobody will remember it because the Sox-Yankees series was and still is the most-hyped series in baseball.

money talks

Claiming that the Red Sox are the "little guys" is like buying into the notion that George W. Bush understands middle-American values and the wealthy John Kerry does not. It's all about clever marketing. At $127 million, the Red Sox have the second-largest payroll in Major League Baseball, yet for much of the first half they were lagging behind the $29 million Devil Rays. You didn't see Ben Affleck whining about Chuck LaMar and his "Evil Empire" as the Rays quietly ascended to second place.

If the Yankees are Godzilla this year, then the Red Sox would be Mothra, and they have both laid waste to the metropolis that is the American League. If you're from a small market like Pittsburgh and detest the Yankees for spending so much, don't jump ship to the Red Sox. Favor a salary cap that would ensure that no team can spend as much as the Yankees, Red Sox, or $100 million Anaheim Angels. If you equate money with greed and sin, then the Red Sox are the second-most-sinful team in the majors. In the meantime, any team can win the championship if they're good enough, and teams like the Mets are perfectly capable of paying $96 million to finish twenty games below .500.

Don't follow the money or the hype. Follow a team that you really love. And if that team loses to another with more money, don't go off whining about a "curse" that predates any current player's birth by two generations. Try this: get back up and play again. I like watching baseball, not trash talk and whining.

Back to October 2004, or to the year 2004.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.