Heart: Why I Hate The New York Yankees

After my three part NFL Lockout I want to move to baseball since it is now baseball season officially. I'm going to use this opportunity to first explain that I hate the New York Yankees. With a Passion. I avoid drafting them on my fantasy baseball teams only because if one of the players is on my team, I feel like I must cheer for him and thus must cheer for a part of the Yankees. I have friends that are Yankees fans and they always say to me, "everyone hates the Yankees because we have more money than any other team." I want to make this very clear. I do not hate the Yankees because they steal, er buy, star players from other teams. I hate the Yankees because they don't win every game and every World Series while stealing, oh, my apologies, again I mean, buying star players from other teams.
I'm not a math person by any means. I don't do math without a calculator and I still use my fingers to do basic addition and subtraction when one is not available. However, even I can see there's something inherently immoral with the numbers reported by USA Today at the beginning of the 2011 season. The Yankees starting day payroll was $202.6 million dollars. When I pointed out the absurdity of this number to one of my Yankee fan friends, her defense was, "well the Red Sox have to spend close to that too, do you hate them?" I answered, "I'm on my way." But here, the numbers don't lie either. Boston actually has only the 3rd highest payroll in the Majors at $161.7 million.  Get your calculators out and do that math. The Yankees spend $40.9 million dollars more than their arch-rivals. That payroll difference is more than the entire Kansas City Royals team payroll ($36.1M). Get this straight. The New York Yankees spend an entire team's payroll more than the 3rd highest paying team. Do the math between the Yankees and the Royals, the lowest paying team. The Yankees spend $166.5 million dollars more than the lowest salaried team. That $166.5 million is more than the total payroll of every individual team in Major League Baseball except two, the Yankees and the Phillies.   


Now, I want to digress a little bit here and focus on the Phillies. Philadelphia now has the second highest payroll in the Majors at $172.9 million. While that's still almost a $30 million discrepancy, the Phillies are religiously following the Yankee manual of signing players. It's not necessarily just the amount of money spent by these teams that I find fascinating. Appalling, yes. Fascinating, no. What I find most interesting about the Yankees and the Phillies roster building is their scouting techniques. Or better described as lack of scouting techniques. They leave the actual scouting and training to other teams and then, once a team has worked really hard honing a guy's skills and teaching him the in's and out's of the game, these teams swoop in and scoop players up in their Italian leather wallets. Take the Phillies rotation, commonly referred to by analysts as the best in baseball. The rotation consists of: Roy Halladay - 6 time All-Star and 2003 AL Cy Young Award winner with the Toronto Blue Jays, Cliff Lee - All-Star and 2008 AL Cy Young Award winner with the Cleveland Indians, Roy Oswalt - 3 time All-Star and 2005 National League Championship Series MVP with the Houston Astros, Joe Blanton - in 2007, known as one of the "Big 3" for the Oakland Athletics and Cole Hamels, the only Philadelphia product in the bunch. A quick glance at the Yankees rotation shows very few differences. CC Sabathia won the 2007 Cy Young Award and went to the All-Star game 3 times as a Cleveland Indian. A.J. Burnett, as a Florida Marlin, pitched a no-hitter in 2001, led the National League in shutouts in 2002  and was an integral part in the Fish winning the World Series in 2003. He also led the American League in strikeouts in 2008 as a Blue Jay. Freddy Garcia, represented the Mariners in two All-Star games, while leading the American League in ERA and innings pitched. He also was in the rotation of the Chicago White Sox in 2005 when they won the World Series. Bartolo Colon had a stellar 2005 as an Angel, going to the All-Star game, leading the American League in wins and earning the Cy Young Award. Ivan Nova is the sole member of the rotation who has not had an incredibly lengthy and successful career in a different uniform and rumors were rampant during the off-season that the Yankees were offering his rotation spot to Francisco Liriano of the Minnesota Twins should he desire it. Of the ten starting pitchers on these two teams, eight of them were the ace of another team at one point or another in their career. And that's just the starting rotation. The Yankees roster gets worse as you get farther away from the mound.

The point here is not to list the accolades of all these teams nor complain about how they are collecting players the same way these players collect trophies and awards. The question I am asking based on this trophy case of players, is how difficult is the job of the GM and Vice President of these clubs? How much skill do you need to just buy what someone else has already deemed the best? I would like to see Brian Cashman, voted the Major League Baseball Executive of the Year in 2009, compile a winning ball club with $55 million dollars. That total pays the salaries of the Yankees 3rd baseman and shortstop. I really would like to see the Executive of the Year earn his award, fill all nine positions on the field and a pitching rotation with $55 million and then win the American League Championship Series. It can't be done right? Not with a team in the same league spending over $200 million - almost 4 times that amount. Oh but it can. And it did. The Texas Rangers went to the World Series in 2010 after beating the AL East Champion Tampa Bay Rays (payroll at $71.9M). Cashman, the gracious man that he is, when asked what he thought about the Rangers success, told the reporter to come ask him again when the Rangers were doing it with their own money and not his. Wow, the Yankees lose and it's because of the revenue sharing program the League has in place. Apparently the Yankees need to pay their players 8 times the amount of other teams in order to secure a victory. Ignore the fact that the Rays won the division the Yankees are in with a payroll almost 3 times less than the Bronx Bombers. I guess Cashman finds solace that if his money can't buy his team wins, at least it's buying someone wins.

And this, my friends, is why I hate the Yankees. Because they don't win every game even though they have the talent. Because a team like the Padres can be one game away from making the playoffs with a payroll of $37.7 million and their best player gets bought and imported to Boston so the Red Sox can increase spending to "be competitive" with the Yankees. The competition has moved from the field to the Executive offices and the winner is no longer announced on the scoreboard but in the accounting logs. Another Yankee fan I know astutely pointed out to me one day that money doesn't guarantee victory. I know this. $202 million doesn't guarantee a championship if you're the Yankees. Why is that? Because a team may only spend less than half of that but they have heart. And that has no monetary value. Despite the massive payroll, the Yankees get beat by poorer teams who have richer hearts. And that is why I hate the Yankees.