Yankees Lose ALCS to Rangers in Six

There have been one hundred and five World Series’ since 1903, when the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates. Twenty years later the New York Yankees brought home their first MLB Championship, and out of this victory was borne a passionate zeal for the boys in pinstripes, or a fiery contempt for their tendency to win. Since their first in 1923, the Yankees have won twenty-six more World Series.

The Yankees are one of those entities that bring out the worst in my unbiased sporting self (See: Pittsburgh Steelers; Pittsburgh Penguins; Manu Ginobli.) As with the rest, my disdain comes from their ability to consistently perform at a high level and beat the teams I root for. Long reigns of success in baseball, however, are particularly maddening, as baseball lacks the salary cap installed in the other major professional leagues, seemingly to prevent, say, the Rooney or the Kraft families, from purchasing the best players and gutting every other team that storms the field. A team like the Yankees isn’t built as much as it’s assembled from the best pieces of the previous season.

The positive side of this argument is the satisfaction of watching a team reviled for buying championships like the GOP buys elections when they’re unseated by an organization whose pockets are significantly shallower. The Yankees payroll in 2008 was $209,081,579. Last night they were defeated in the American League Championship Series by the Texas Rangers, a franchise that’s never made it to the big dance until now. The Rangers’ 2008 payroll was $68,239,551: that’s just under a third of the New York bankroll.

The fact that the Rangers all but dominated the series is a testament to all that makes modern American sports exhilarating: emotion, chemistry, faith, and a bit of luck. And while it was disarming to watch to Texas’ Josh Hamilton, the ALCS MVP, point to the sky during his acceptance speech and explain that it was all due to God and our Lord, Jesus Christ, it was refreshing to think of the remainder of the postseason sans pinstripes.

It was also interesting to think about a loss like this, in six games, the significance of a failure to live up to expectations. The Yankees bats didn’t crack the way they’ve seemed to in recent playoffs, and the Rangers put themselves in a position where all they had to do to win was to rally around good pitching and play mistake-free baseball. One has to wonder what they took away from this elimination, and what kind of effect it will have on the organization. The honest answer: probably not a whole lot, as next year they’ll probably have signed, for a hefty sum, Cliff Lee, his generations greatest clutch pitcher, who beat them in Game 3, as well as several other studs who made a name for themselves in 2010 and are looking for a slightly larger check after every game. Because the Yankees dynasty is just that, a rule of such a sequence, one of big baseball money.