F the Jankees

RUYA (that's an acronym (I think its an acronym) for Right Up Your Ass). To all the yankees fans out there: RUYA. I love the fact that your team is done. I am a huge baseball fan. I played in college and I set little league records. I love baseball and for years, the new york yankees were ruining the game.

Here's the breakdown:

Two teams, one is the yankees, the other is a mid-market team in the middle of the country.

yankees payroll: $200 million
MM team: $60 million

You might say, so what? Doesn't it just mean that MM team has to be smart? yes, but its so much more than that. If MM invests in a player and something doesn't work out (injury, underproduction etc.) then the team likely will not be able to compete. If the yankees screw up (every year they make a bunch of mistakes. Don't believe me? Here's this year's short list: Carl Pavano, Jared Wright, Kevin Brown, Matt Lawton and Tony Womack), they can just keep buying until they get it right. If another team made half those mistakes, they'd be in last place.

Some of you might be saying so what, if they can afford it let them do whatever they want or, I thought he was a comic, why am I reading about baseball? Here is what I say to question 1: Baseball and other professional sports are a unique product. Part of that product is competition. Baseball finally adopted a form of revenue sharing to attempt to insure some sense of competitive balance as football and basketball have enjoyed for years. A pro sport is really just an organization of owners who, quite often, are not held accountable to 'what's good for the game'. The commissioner is appointed by the owners and he is their puppet sent to watch out for their interests. The point here is that no one is holding the owners accountable. Fans complain about player salaries but someone is signing those contracts. The owners created their own mess and then spin the situation so that the players are vilified as greedy. Owners knew full well about the steroid situation for years but they turned a blind eye. Home runs were being hit and asses were in seats, they weren't complaining in the aftermath of the strike that cancelled the World Series a few years ago. The owners got together and decided to spin the issue and make it a bargaining chip against the players.

My boys in the minor leagues were approached many times by guys within the organization with designer steroids that were 'undetectable'. It was being encouraged. Those guys were just bodies and if one of them pans out into a 40 HR second baseman, it was worth it.

Anyway, all the bandwagon yankee fans out there can eat poo for another year until the yankees win the offseason again. Real yankee fans are fine. I mean that. The guys that went through the days of Mattingly, Matty Nokes, Kevin Maas etc. are fine by me. The smelly dickholes that jumped on the bandwagon after that little bastard turned Jeter's fly out into a home run, can go play in traffic.

I am rooting for St. Louis to win this thing. 1) best baseball fans in the world 2) unbelievably classy organization 3) Top 2 GM in all of pro sports (Walt Jockety is right behind John Schuerholz of the Braves) that finds guys that were cast off by others and they are rejuvinated in STL (Chris Carpenter, Jason Marquis etc.). Let's go Cards.

My new jokes are crisp. Dremos on Wed could change the world.