After the Yankees lost on Friday night I had basically stopped following sports for a while. I hadn’t watch ESPN or read any of my normal Yankees Blogs, and so boy was I surprised by all that has gone on since then. I discover that pitching coach Dave Eiland has been fired, CC Sabathia is having surgery on his knee, Kristin Lee the wife of Cliff, was unhappy with how Ranger fans were treated (as if somehow only Yankee fans boo and jeer opposing team fans. Did you not hear the “Yankees S*#k” chants at the Ballpark in Arlington?), the official scorer for the Yankees, Bill Shannon, died in a house fire, Pettitte was pitching injured in the playoffs, and the Yankees first goal is to get Joe Girardi signed to an extension. And those were just a few of the stories. Wow.
Fox has got to be very upset with their World Series match-up which starts tonight. Of the final four teams, this was their worst nightmare, because outside of diehard baseball fans, who are going to watch anyways, and fans in Dallas and San Francisco, no one cares. Sure there are some good stories to follow, and the pitching has the possibility of being great, but these are not teams or players that people know, and Fox and MLB are really to blame for this.
Now as a Yankee fan I love the fact I can watch my team play games on national television that might otherwise be blacked out because of the absolutely ridiculous television contract that MLB signed with Fox. But when the teams that they push all the time are the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies, Dodgers, Braves, Cubs, and a few others, then it is little wonder that people never learn about any of the other teams. And if they don’t know those teams they are not going to be interested in watching them in the post season. In addition, the general marketing and advertising of the game is just ridiculously stupid and behind the times.
In many ways, MLB is like the church. They are counting on their much older fan base to continue to tell the story and bring in new generations rather than reaching out and doing creative things to bring the new fans in themselves. In other words, their marketing plan is doomed to fail at some point. One of the reasons they are working so hard to keep Mark Cuban from buying a team, besides for the fact that Jerry Reinsdorf (who owns the White Sox and is one of the commissioners closest friends) can’t stand him, is because they know that he will push them on this and be a general thorn in their side. As much as I can’t stand a lot of what the NBA does and represents, they do a very good job in marketing their sport and their personalities, and Cuban even pushes the NBA.
I don’t really have a good prediction on the series. I think the Rangers are the better team top to bottom, but I would also say that about the Yankees over the Rangers, so there you go. Both teams have been sitting out for a while, which is absolutely ridiculous. Baseball is an everyday sport, and it needs to be played every day. Every. Single. Day. Give one day for travel between home games, but other than that keep going. The Yankees sat for seven days before they played the Rangers, and it clearly didn’t help them. Remember the 2006 Tigers, they sat forever before the series and they suffered the consequences.
In this case both teams have been sitting for almost an equal amount so it will be which team can get their timing back the quickest. That does also make for the possibility of some ugly, sloppy baseball, which is not a good product to be putting on the field for what is supposed to be the premier event in baseball. For some this might be the only baseball they watch all year and it should be the best that can be found, but often it isn’t, and again MLB and their ridiculous television contracts are responsible.
I think what the series might come down to is which team is happy to just be there and which team wants to win it all. If you remember back to when the Rays made it to the series, they all talked about how happy they were to make it to the series, and that is how they played. They had already achieved what they wanted to do. (I know they all still want to win, but I think there was a letdown because they had already achieved so much. They certainly did not play like the team that won the American League East and pennant that year.) There are other teams that have done this as well.
Bottom line is that I am going with the Rangers in 6. I could be totally wrong because there are just way too many unknowns in this series. As a Yankee fan I’ve been going back and forth of whether it’s better for Lee to win or not, and I think I’ve decided it is best for us to have him win in Texas. This is true for a couple of reasons.
One is that winning the series in the best that is ever going to happen in Texas, and so that is already out of the way. There is nothing else Lee can do there. Two, then the Yankees can say: “Sure you’re a World Series Champion with Texas, but you haven’t won one with the Yankees. Winning in Texas makes you king of the Dallas metroplex, but winning in New York makes you the king of the world. A victory parade through the suburbs simply cannot compare to a ticker tape parade through the canyon of heroes, so come to New York and we’ll really show you what it means to be a champion.”
So what do you say Cliff?
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