A baseball season is a novel. At its heart is a cast of characters–guys with hopes, goals, ambitions, problems, flaws, things to prove. The characters individually create a character that is a team, and over the 
course of the season, as the individuals succeed and fail and as the team succeeds and fail, dramas are played out. Losing can be as compelling as winning, maybe even more so. But it is awfully hard to beat winning. Last night the Yankees won their 27th World Championship; the St. Louis Cardinals, who have won the second most, have
won ten. Leading the way in the 7-3 victory over the Phils were two venerable war horses, Andy Pettitte, who, pitching on three days rest, had little more to offer than guts and know-how, and the club pro, the lethally dangerous Hideki Matsui, who took a diminished role this year and used it to become the Most Valuable Player of the Series, with six RBIs last night. But everyone on this team made a significant contribution: the relentless Derek Jeter (3 more hits last night), the great Mariano Rivera (a five-out closing last night), the redeemed Alex Rodriguez, the determined Johnny Damon, and so on. Very satisfying, especially after many of them had struggled through years of failure that were complicated by the burden of dashed expectations–a very good group to root for. Eleven down, 2010 to go.
I thought the line from Weekend Update was pretty good. Not quoting exactly, but something like, “The economy seems to be rebounding, especially here in New York where spending has increased. Two examples are the Yankees, and Michael Bloomberg, who both recently bought victories for themselves.”
The Yankees are a great team, but they have to be. They are essentially the all-stars. Just about any All-Star free agent out there gets signed by the Yankees.
It was a fun series anyway, as always it was bittersweet because now we have the long, dark, cold period with nothing to mark the days from one another until we hear magical phrases like, “Pitchers and catchers report…”
The money is really a two-edged sword. And as we all saw between 2001 and 2008, a large payroll is no guarantee of playoff success. The Yankees had long been a free-spending team, but throughout the eighties, this brought them no success at all. But in February 2001, the team signed Derek Jeter to a ten year, $189 million contract. That set the big ticket model in stone, because the only way the team could insure that such a huge contract would make sense would be by surrounding Jeter with the best players available. This approach seems to offer opportunities, but it also creates problems. The team ended up acquiring uni-dimentional sluggers like Jason Giambi, overpriced middle relievers, and declining pitchers like Randy Johnson. One of the biggest contributions to the 2009 title came in 2008, when GM Brian Cashman allowed the big contracts of Abreu, Mussina and Giambi to expire all at once, giving him the financial latitude he needed to acquire three stars who were in their prime. But there are also signs Cashman is aiming to change the model, most prominently when he refused to give up a lot of young and inexpensive talent for Johann Santana.