Keidel: Yankees Franchise Has Lost Its Luster
By Jason Keidel
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Every oddsmaker from Vegas to the Virgin Islands seems simpatico on one thing: The Chicago Cubs are the favorites to win the World Series.
But beyond the pole position, the parts are rather interchangeable.
In the Big Apple, the Mets are a few notches ahead of the Yankees, somewhere between 10-to-1 and 14-to-1.
There's no consensus on the Yankees, who dwell in the betting ether, between 16-to-1 and 25-to-1. The Toronto Blue Jays have better odds and, in most precincts, so do the Boston Red Sox.
Maybe this is a good thing. The Bronx Bombers have been baseball chalk for so long it's hard to recall a run of years when they were afterthoughts.
Who are the Yankees? Maybe it's middle age, but some of us just aren't jaded the way we used to be. The Yankees aren't, well, gods anymore.
It's not just about wins and losses. Lord knows the they have way more of the former than any franchise. But there's just something missing from the experience. The Cubs, who haven't won a World Series since 1908 and haven't even played in one since 1945, are more than a novelty act.
There's an inherent charm to the team and town that you don't see on River Avenue. Their fans have suffered for a century, yet still shiver outside Wrigley Field every April, waiting for the gates to raise on the new season. As soon as the Yankees lose consecutive games, fans are speed-dialing WFAN, calling for the vocational head of the best pitcher, manager, owner or DH. Team COO Lonn Trost represents the chasm between the white and blue collars, the Abercrombie crowd ringside and the welder in the bleachers, those who fly in Learjets around the world and those who live in it.
The Mets are Big Apple darlings because they're young and fresh, play in a cool, retro ballpark and have to conquer their hardscrabble history. There's no sense of entitlement to the team or their fans. You won't see some millennial wearing a "Got Rings?" T-shirt. While many Yankees fans are true blue and know baseball history, there's a overwhelming sense that a Yankees game is flooded with elitists who spend seven innings chirping into their iPhones and couldn't tell you the score without unearthing it on some trendy app.
Then there's money, which is always the Yankee emblem, the Gordon Gekko of our pastime, always viewed through the thin cotton prism of the almighty dollar. According to Spotrac.com, the Yankees' payroll is roughly $221 million. Only the Dodgers spend more ($248 million). No other club spends more than $200 million.
By contrast, the Houston Astros, the team that vanquished the Yankees in the 2015 playoffs -- if you consider zero runs in nine innings a playoff appearance -- spend a paltry $89 million on players. By vivid contrast, the World Series champions, the Kansas City Royals, have a $135 million payroll, while the crosstown rival Mets spend about $128 million.
Ever since Larry Lucchino slapped that "Evil Empire" hex on the Yanks, they have twirled down the toilet of playoff failure. The lone exception was 2009, a perfect confluence of timing and talent. The Yankees accidentally swung open their colossal war chest on high character guys such as CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira. And even A.J. Burnett was able to shed his small-town sensibilities long enough to break through on Broadway. And, in a moment of sweet irony, Johnny Damon came through to help the Bombers bag their 27th championship.
They don't hang pennants for pennants in the Bronx. No parties for division titles, no parades for wild cards. The Yankees are the only team in sports with that singular mission statement that sticks: World champs or bust.
The Knicks muse profoundly about the ghosts and old days and the "Mecca of Basketball." But in reality MSG is a basketball mausoleum that trades on nostalgia, the grainy, smoky memories of 1969 -- the year man walked on the moon, the year Joe Namath walked on water, the year the Mets became the darlings of baseball, behind the momentum of great pitching and the mojo of a black cat.
The Yankees don't go eons sans rings. That's why they're worth more than any team in the sport and, along with Real Madrid and the Dallas Cowboys, worth as much as any team in any sport. (Forbes has their value at about $3.2 billion.)
That's why pinstripes are the motif of champions. They look great on suits, and great on athletes. The Yankees don't have names on their uniforms because the brand is transcendent. Like Notre Dame and the Dallas Cowboys, donning the gold helmet, the lone star or the pinstripes not only imbue the player with athletic splendor but also biblical virtue.
We know that's not literally true. Greg Hardy was just a Cowboy. The Fighting Irish have been plagued with academic fraud, DWIs and a South Bend party in 2010 that sent 44 students to jail, including eight football players (among them was Joe Montana's son). And the Yankees employ a pitcher who ends couples counseling with gunshots in his garage. (Allegedly!)
Perhaps the most popular piece I've ever written was about the Yankees surrendering the throne of baseball's best franchise. To the St. Louis Cardinals. Not only is the stadium nicer, not only are the people friendlier, but the club racks up 100 wins a year sans the spats, stats, fanfare and dysfunction of the Big Apple.
Lose Albert Pujols? No sweat. Chris Carpenter snaps a limb? No worries. Tony La Russa, the resident savant, with the stratospheric IQ and Professor X managerial moves, rides off to retirement? Mike Matheny fills the uniform with equal nobility, if not knowledge.
St. Louis wins with a fraction of the Yankees' budget, spending $80 million less for more wins. The Cardinals are a montage of harmony, a Rockwellian postcard from the heartland, where they make beer, grow corn and build baseball titans.
The Yankees will always compete and hover around the upper rungs of the sport, just by dint of their dollars and their historical prerogatives. When you have dozens of Cooperstown denizens and can drop a quarter-billion on personnel, you have an inherent and insane advantage over the proletarians in Tampa or Denver or Oakland.
But the verities of victories won't change in baseball. Great pitching still trumps great hitting. Build your team with scouts and drafts, with a dash of decent veterans. In other words, the recipe of the glory years, the Torre years. Mike Francesa often points to the Jason Giambi signing as the flashpoint of their descent. (Giambi never got a ring.)
But do we give a damn anymore? How often has your old man or grandpa waxed romantic about an improvised subway ride to the old stadium for a quarter, buying a seat for a buck-fifty and a beer for a buck? Fans could lounge in the outfield, when the monuments jutted like teeth from the grass.
My old man, raised in western Pennsylvania, a few fly balls from West Virginia, took a bus to the Port Authority in 1961, on a sun-swathed September day, and saw Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Like many teens who lived in or around Pittsburgh, his mind was far from the classroom, ear glued to a radio, when the forlorn Pirates shocked the world the year before, on the bat of Bill Mazeroski, in Game 7 of the Fall Classic, as Yogi drifted into the ivy-coated wall in Forbes Field, watching the ball and the World Series sail over his head. Beating the Yankees was like slaying the Kraken.
So he was stunned by the freckling of fans in the Bronx a year later, that arguably the best team since the '27 Yanks was playing in total stealth. By the idea that Gotham was so spoiled that no one even cared Maris was on the back of Babe Ruth. At least half the stadium was empty. Those who went still dressed like they were attending a Broadway premiere. Suits and fedoras, a rolled-up program choked by their right fist, clapping with a Camel pinched between their teeth.
That's no longer an issue. You can find seats behind home plate for a cozy $2,000. Then you can drop another $500 on food. Or you can stroll down the bowels of the stadium, have a steak, sushi or martini, and buy a replica DiMaggio jersey for $250. Walking into the new Yankee Stadium is like strolling into a bank -- cold, sterile and expensive. Then, after the game, you can stew for a few hours on the Cross Bronx or Major Deegan Expressway.
Then, of course, Trost chimed in, warning the undesirables that they weren't welcome in the desirable seats. Stay away from the aristocrats who drain the fat expense account. It was the classic "get off my lawn" moment from the Yankees executive.
MORE: Keidel: New Ticket Policy Widens Divide Between Yankees, Everyday Fans
One of the concerns about the Yankees -- assuming you may watch them, and haven't been snared by this toxic web of corporate squabbles between YES and Comcast, like yours truly -- is that beyond wins and losses, they just aren't that interesting anymore.
Maybe there are some young Yanks in the pipeline, on that pinstriped conveyer belt that delivered Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Mariano Rivera. Not likely.
Whenever one generation gripes about the next, they come across as bitter old men, stuck in the mud of their halcyon years, too stiff to handle change. One of baseball's charms is that you could watch a team in 2016 through the prism of 1916. Does that matter anymore? Or should we just retreat to our rocking chairs, lemonade and lamentations?
Maybe. Or maybe it really isn't the same anymore. The Bronx Bombers have been that good for that long. But few teams fear the Yankees. Fewer revere the Yankees. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
