YANKEE REBUTTAL
Another year, another Yankee flameout

By Tom Stern

The New York Yankees are the Donald Trumps of baseball: Blowhards with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Overhyped, overrated underachievers. Bumptious bullies with scarcely a shred of class.

But the fix is in. The New York Yankees pay three of their players more than the entire payroll of some major league teams. Big-league baseball stacks the deck for its biggest cities and keeps its small-market clubs down. Commissioner Bud Selig is all about pleasing corporations and generating TV revenue. Baseball's true fans are an inconvenience to be brushed aside. Selig's whole philosophy can be summed up in one equation: Yankees + World Series = perfect season.

And yet, despite all its money and the strong support from the game's highest authority, in the last 10 years, the Yankees are tied in World Series victories with the Arizona Diamondbacks. (And who did the D'backs beat in that 2001 Series? Oh, that's right, the Yankees.) The Yankees organization is one of staggering ineptitude. The farm system is laughable. The starting rotation is among the worst in baseball once you're past CC Sabathia (another exorbitant free agent since the organization can't develop its own players). The catcher can't catch anymore; the shortstop and the closer are jalopies running on fumes.

Cliff Lee made the world a little bit better place by signing with Philadelphia over the winter, and telling the Yankees front office what it could do with its obscene amounts of cash. Lee had his priorities straight: It's more fun to whip bullies than to join them. Lee knows that New York's fans are knuckle-dragging hooligans and the area, despite its international renown and veneer of sophistication, is a crumbling island of lost souls.

This team with the resources to win the World Series every year will be lucky to finish second in the American League East.

Tom@UltimateSportsGuide.net.