Tidbits

Watching a clip of an old football game, I wondered: where does moving the goal posts to the back of the end zone rank in the annals of no-duh moves in professional sports? It's hard to believe it took over 50 years for the league to realize that giant metal posts protruding from the field of play is not such a great idea.

In baseball news, the MVP and Cy Young award voters did a good job this year. All four winners (Joe Mauer, Albert Pujols, Zack Greinke, and Tim Lincecum) were worthy of their awards. Historically voters have been known to overvalue things that are not great indicators of an individual's worth to his team, like team victories, stolen bases, and RBIs for a batter, and wins for a pitcher. This year they got it right, especially with Greinke, who was clearly the best pitcher in baseball last season, despite having just 16 wins (the fewest of any starting pitcher to ever win the AL Cy Young award during a non-strike shortened year).

In other baseball news, in this week's The New Yorker, there is an article chronicling the Yankees World Series-winning season by Roger Angell titled "Daddies Win: can we love the Yankees now?". (I can't find a link on-line. It's in the Nov. 30, 2009 issue.) It's one of the more annoying pieces I have read in a while. It's seven pages of the author performing literary fellatio on the Yankees. (Although, in a periodical named after a person from New York, what does one expect?) The article highlights, glorifies even, everything people outside of the Big Apple hate about the Yankees. Here's an excerpt.

While the roses are going around, we should revisit those free-agent signings of C. C. Sabathia, Mark Teixeira, and A. J. Burnett last winter, whose combined contracts cost the Yankees an extra $432.5 million, and accounted for $52 million out of the team's salary total of $201 million for 2009. (The next nearest is the Mets $135 million, and the farthest is the Marlins $36 million.) Cries of unfairness and fresh tropes about the unlevel playing field, so ferocious in March, seemed fainter at the end this time, because each of those multimillionaires so clearly delivered at his job, and because the Yankees won. They will never be populist heroes, but this time it was O.K. to like them.

Huh? Doesn't the fact that their highly paid superstars produced make it less fair? Doesn't this just reinforce the reality that the Yankees have a huge economic advantage over almost every team in baseball? That, in essence, they are just outbidding the other clubs for championships? This seems like more of a reason to dislike them to me.

More from the article.

General Manager Brian Cashman, so often second-guessed by the Tampa front office and badgered at his work by the overbearing but now ancient and ailing George Steinbrenner, was the Michelangelo of this club...

The Michelangelo? Really? Yes, only the mind's eye of a true artist could have foreseen the beauty in adding Sabathia, Teixeira, and Burnett to a roster (not to mention readding A-Rod, for nearly $30 million a season, a year prior). No other GM in the league, nor any semi-coherent baseball fan in the country, could have imagined that bringing these pieces together would result in a good team. Cashman has the gift. Or he's a beneficiary of a broken system in which his team is one of about three or four that can afford to sign the best of the best free agents, and have money left over for quality second tier guys like Burnett. Sadly, this is what MLB has become. It's a league for the rich. There will always be a sprinkling of poorer teams with sharp management or good fortune that have a nice run with a nucleus of young talent, still under team control (late 90s - early 00s A's, '03 Marlins, '07 Rays, current Twins), and there will always be down years for the fatcats ('08 Yankees, '09 Mets), but for the most part it's going to be Yankees et al., year in and year out. That's just the way baseball is right now. That the "cries of unfairness and fresh tropes about the unlevel playing field" seem fainter now is probably because baseball fans are gradually resigning themselves to this fact.