Idiots Write About Sports

[One of my New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time talking about all the many articles I was going to write and more time actually writing them — basically to not let the sun go down without spending some time working on some article that had nothing to do with the day job. I’ve been pretty lax about this so far, but I figure that an increase in sports blog material here, some more TeeVee pieces there, and I’ll be hitting my writing goal in no time. Lucky you.]

I’m going to leave all the Who Made Out the Best in the ARod-Soriano Trade talk to my betters. There’s plenty of analysis and opinion out there, some of it very interesting, some of it apparently penned in crayon.

Instead, just a few random thoughts before the Yankees trade for Randy Johnson to fill their left-handed starter role, figure out how to re-animate Rogers Hornsby to play second, and sign both the Phillie Phanatic and the Mariner Moose to multi-year, multi-million-dollar free agent deals so they can corner the mascot market.

1. As strange as it seems, I feel kind of sorry for Yankee fans -- not the folks who show up at the Stadium every October sporting hats with the price tags still dangling off the back, but the true-blue live-and-die-with-every-game fan. Because these fans are never going to know the indescribable joy of watching their team overcome adversity and weather the ups and downs that come during any season, even if the Yankees win the World Series next fall in convincing fashion. After all, that's what's supposed to happen. Anything less will be a staggering disappointment.

Believe me, I know of what I speak. I'm a Detroit Red Wings fan. And for the 2001-2002 season, the Wings did their very best impression of the New York Yankees. Alongside homegrown talent like Steve Yzerman, Sergei Federov, and Nicklas Lidstrom, the Wings, through trades and free agency, assembled a galaxy of stars, capped off by the acquisitions of Dominik Hasek, Luc Robitaille, and Brett Hull. You could argue that nine future Hall of Famers suited up for the Red Wings that season; even a conservative estimate would cap the Hall of Fame total at a still impressive six or seven, depending on your feelings for Brendan Shanahan. And while all that talent was fun to watch on any given night, any time the Wings flirted with early elimination -- down two games to none to Vancouver in the first round, down three games to two to Colorado in the conference finals, and one Brett Hull slapshot away from trailing the Carolina Hurricanes two games to one in the Stanley Cup finals -- the effect on die-hard fans was maddening. This team was not supposed to lose.

When the Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997, ending a 40-plus-year drought, I felt elated. When they repeated the very next year, it was still a thrill. And when that cast of all-stars dispatched with Carolina in five games and Yzerman hoisted the Cup, the only feeling I felt was relief. Well, of course, we won -- we were supposed to win.

It's going to be the same feeling for Yankee fans if Rodriguez and Giambi and the rest of the Hessian merchants fulfill the terms of their contract and deliver a championship to the Bronx. Oh, it still feels good to win under those circumstances, but not nearly so good as you might imagine. And it makes the thought of coming up short unbelievably aggravating.

When you open up The New York Post in mid-February and see the headline "The Pennant Stays Here," there's only one direction you can go. Play the best baseball you can, dispense with all comers, and you're still only living up to expectations.

2. Red Sox fans -- justly renowned for their overwrought self-pity -- have been taking this A-Rod development with uncharacteristic equanimity. Well, not the ones still mending a broken heart. But troll around the Internet long enough, and you'll find that famous O-woe-is-us-Red-Sox-fans mentality: how can you compete against the unlimited budget of the Yankees, this was inevitable once the Red Sox trade fell through, Evil Empire blah blah blah.

The gist of the gripes: as good as the Sox may be in 2004, they'll always be underdogs to the sinister Yankees and Steinbrenner's pennant-buying ways.

Say, let's look at that projected 2004 Red Sox lineup, and how each player arrived in Boston, shall we?

C -- Jason Varitek (acquired via trade from Seattle)
1B -- Kevin Millar (acquired via free-agency after Millar reneged on an agreement to play in Japan)
2B-- Pokey Reese (acquired via free-agency)
SS -- Nomar Garciaparra (drafted by Boston)
3B -- Bill Mueller (acquired via free-agency)
LF -- Manny Ramirez (acquired via free-agency)
CF -- Johnny Damon (acquired via free-agency)
RF -- Trot Nixon (drafted by Boston)
DH -- David Ortiz (acquired via free-agency)
SP -- Pedro Martinez (acquired via trade Montreal)
SP -- Curt Schilling (acquired via trade from Arizona)
SP -- Derek Lowe (acquired via trade from Seattle)
SP -- Byung-Hyun Kim (acquired via trade from Arizona)
SP -- Tim Wakefield (acquired via free-agency)
RP -- Keith Foulke (acquired via free-agency)

For those of you scoring at home, that's two homegrown players among the Sox everyday lineup, starting rotation and closer -- charitably, three since Varitek never played a major league game out of a Red Sox uniform. One of those homegrown players -- Garciaparra -- Boston would have gladly kicked to the curb had it managed to close the ARod deal. The acquisitions of Mueller, Lowe, Ortiz and, to some extent, Millar are the kind of savvy pick-ups of players with overlooked value that front offices should be commended for.

But the rest? The trades for Martinez and Schilling were basically the kind of salary dumps that infuriate Red Sox fans when the Yankees are profiting from them. Likewise, Ramirez was signed to one of those gaudy $100 million a year contracts that one typically associates with the Bronx. And Foulke and Damon came to the Red Sox after their current small-market team couldn't match Boston's generous offers.

So explain to me why this makes the Red Sox lovable underdogs while the Yankees are the Evil Empire that spares no expense to bring in the best talent (For the record, the Yankees boast four homegrown players among their lineup, rotation and closer -- Jeter, Williams, Posada and Rivera.). Seems to me the only difference between the two teams -- other than the fact the Yankees have a limitless budget and Boston must scuttle by with a slightly-less-than-limitless budget -- is that New York buys its pennants far more effectively.

3. If you want to feel sorry for a team in the wake of the ARod trade, it isn't Boston that needs your pity. The Red Sox still have a very good team which is still likely to reach the playoffs, whether it's via the wild card or a divisional championship. And once there, Boston has the kind of pitching that, if healthy, should give the Yankee hitters fits.

No, the teams that come out looking badly in this situation are the small-market teams that could never even fantasize about trading for someone like Alex Rodriguez, who've been overshadowed offseason-long by the escalating Boston-New York maneuvers, and head to spring training as after-thoughts and also-rans. Jason Whitlock said it best on Sunday's Sports Reporters telecast. In Kansas City, the fans had been excited about the free-agent signings of Benito Santiago and Juan Gonzalez. Now, in the wake of yet another Yankee deal, it all seems kind of insignificant.

Competitive imbalances are nothing new in baseball. The Yankees, save for 12-year drought in the 1960s and '70s and a 14-year postseason-free existence through the '80s and early '90s, have been World Series contenders for the past 80 years. Good teams have always found a way to beat the Pinstripes at their own game... or at least give them everything they can handle.

But even though I know intellectually that fans of the St. Louis Browns and Philadelphia Phillies 70 years ago had the same World Series expectations that Pirates and Brewers fans harbor today -- which is to say, none -- trades like the A-Rod deal make me feel like competitive imbalances are getting worse, not better or even remaining the same.

Chucklehead writers like Yahoo's execrable Dan Wetzel who burble nonsense about how fans can't ask for a better owner than George Steinbrenner miss the big picture. Yeah, it's great when an owner puts all his resources toward winning but not when it's at the expense of his league's overall health. Baseball is a competitive business, sure, but it's an unusual one in the sense that an owner has some interest in making sure his rivals are healthy and competitive. Sure, Yankee fans can revel in the fact that all Steinbrenner cares about is winning, but when fans of 28 out of 30 teams are wondering why they're bothering paying attention to sport, well, that's not good for anyone long-term, not even the Yankees.

Yes, teams with tighter budgets and a lot of front-office savvy can still compete. The Oakland Athletics have made the postseason four consecutive seasons and have a shot at making it five in a row -- only the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves enjoy longer streaks. But the A's -- and a growing number of teams -- go into each season knowing that for the playoffs to be a realistic goal, very little can go wrong. The Yankees head into each season knowing that, barring acts of God, they'll be in the playoffs. That hardly seems equitable.

Back when the 2002 strike was looming, I was kicking around a half-baked idea that's probably gotten even more half-baked in the ensuing two years. But here goes nothing: if the mid- to small-market teams wanted to force real change in the way baseball operates -- a more regressive payroll tax, a salary cap, more substantial revenue sharing, what have you -- it seems to me that the best course of action would be to simply forfeit games against the Yankees. That would deny the Yankees gate receipts, but more importantly, it would decimate the franchise's broadcast revenues -- what really separates the Yankees from the have-nots and most of the rest of the haves.

"We're glad you're getting hundreds of millions of dollars for your TV and radio rights," the Oaklands and Minnesotas and Kansas Citys of the world could say. "But unless we start seeing a substantial share of that revenue which we're helping to generate by playing you, we'll be sitting the next homestand out. Hope that YES and WFAN and WCBS are willing to shell out $200 million to carry a schedule of intrasquad games."

Now the flaws to this scheme should be pretty clear. It would require a dozen or more baseball owners to agree to a common course of action and stick to it -- and apart from the collusion cases of the 1980s, when has that ever happened? No semi-competent commissioner -- not even Bud Selig -- would ever let such a mutiny occur. The lost revenue of a forfeited series is far more likely to have an immediate sting for the Royals or the Athletics than it would for the Yankees. And even if such a half-baked scenario were to play out -- assuming the player's union decided to stop reading the newspapers for a couple of months -- there's still the not-insignificant issue of exactly how to make the baseball landscape more competitive. Revenue sharing? A hard cap? Rifling through Steinbrenner's pockets for change?

I don't know if the times are drastic enough for such drastic measures. All I know is that as a lifelong baseball fan, as the Yankees payroll grows ever larger, I have about 200 million more reasons to turn my attention elsewhere.