No, none of that is what makes the Yankees bad.
Lemme give you another example. Say your son is on a Little League team, one of eight in the league. Not the best on the team, not the worst; a good team player who has some fun with the game.
Now, at the end of the season, your son lines up with the players from his team, and the players of six of the other teams. And the coach of the eighth team - the one that wears, oh, say, pinstripes - comes out and selects the best two or three players from the other seven teams. And he brings them over to his side, and promises them free rides to the game, brand new uniforms, free ice cream after every game, and tickets to movies and pro games and concerts and such. The kid goes for it every time, of course, and the team gets written up in the local paper all the time, and even the girls follow it and cheer for them.
Every so often, they'll pick up a kid who might not play so well for them...so they give the kid a payoff and let him go to play somewhere else, and they grab some other, better kid - maybe the one that hit that home run against them in that important game, or pitched some scoreless innings against them.
Now this happens every single season, and over those seasons, your son's team does pretty well - they have fun playing together, and maybe they're even a winning squad. But over time, that team in the pinstripes is always winning. They're walking over other squads, and finishing in first as often as not...and the parents of the kids on that team are constantly pestering the coach to grab some other good player - maybe the star player on your kid's team. They expect the championships. They're disappointed with anything else.
The other teams resent this team, of course, and that humiliating process of having to stand there and let the other team pick over your players, luring away the ones that they want. And they get called names in those papers that write about the pinstriped team: "poor losers", "pinstripe-bashers", "sour grapes".
You think that maybe this isn't necessarily fair. Maybe the game should be about team play and developing players and having some heart...not just buying players and installing them like commodities. You think about complaining to the head of the league, because there should be rules about that, but they haven't done anything in the past and aren't going to start now. (One team in the league, with a particular color of hosiery, finally gets this idea that they'll just start doing the same thing with a bunch of new kids. They end up with players from far, far away - kids your son has never seen before - and they start winning championships and then getting some of the league kids, too. It's the only way they can compete, they say...but that's another story.)
Finally, you end up bumping into one of the parents whose kid is on that pinstriped team. He talks about his son's team, and the championship they're playing for, and you can't help it - you get a little feisty. You talk to him about how unfair it is, how it isn't a sign of any decent baseball skill...how it doesn't prove anything - not about the players, not about the team, not about the parents, not about anyone's character or heart or anything that makes the game exciting. It just proves that, more often than not, a bigger and richer team can beat up on a smaller and poorer team - and that's all.
And the parent you're talking to looks just a bit puzzled about all this, and thinks about it for maybe two seconds...and then says, "Yeah...but they're always winnin', aren't they?"
That is what makes the Yankees bad.
You're welcome.
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Originally Posted by Frijolito
I know exactly what you're saying. I was there last October for both games, because I really didn't know when the next time the Rockies would be in the World Series would be.
