Of the four teams remaining in the MLB playoffs as of today, by far the most important to Cleveland is the New York Yankees.
However, the issue has only a little do with the fact that the Yanks were dominated by former Tribe ace Cliff Lee on Monday night. Current Yankee Carston Charles Sabathia plays some role as well. But in both cases, those players are relevant in only a very abstract way.
Let me explain.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, as of last night around 11 PM ET, the Texas Rangers are now on the verge of pushing the Yankees off a cliff, 3 games to 1, with only a single game remaining to be played in Yankee Stadium.
For the past seven days, though, I have been hearing one pundit after another hand the series to the Yankees. Many of their arguments are laughable. For instance, I went on a minor Twitter diatribe on Monday afternoon when PTI’s Mike Wilbon chose Andy Pettite to “clearly” dominate Cliff in game 2 because, somehow, Pettite’s post-season success was repeatable and Cliff’s was not.
But even as the Rangers have thrown shovelful after shovelful of dirt on the Yankees since Friday, I’ve heard one argument rise above the others: the Yankees will ultimately win the series because…they are the Yankees.
The history. The 27 World Series championships. The pinstripes.
Somehow, it all adds up to the notion that as soon as a player puts on a Yankee uniform, he gains some arcane knowledge about how to win in the post-season that he never would have had otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Watch some ESPN programming in the hours between now and the start of game 5. Watch the TBS pre-game show. And listen for how many times one of the analysts says something to the effect of, “Yeah, they may be down 3-1, but you have to remember, this is a team that has won 27 championships.”
Any time someone spouts this ludicrously inaccurate idea, it makes me want to jump through the TV and re-enact this scene from Airplane on the offending party.
This is a very simple logical exercise. The Yankees roster and coaching staff in the 2010 ALCS has never won a single championship, let alone 26 additional. Don’t believe me? Then what team was current Yankee relief pitcher Kerry Wood throwing for at this time last year? Therefore, by definition, this year’s team is different from last years and every other before it.
Yes, some of the players on the current team have won a title. Some, like Derek Jeter, have even won multiple titles. But this team as presently constituted is not the team that has fought its way to the top of Major League Baseball 27 times.
To make the opposite argument is to assert that the city of New York, or the borough of the Bronx, or the Yankee uniform—SOMETHING about the team has an intrinsic property that equates to winning, when the real answer is that they can just drop insane amounts of cash on the best free agents in the game year after year.
If you haven’t figured out the correlation to Cleveland by now, here it is: just as so many people irrationally believe in this Yankee winning spirit, so many others believe in a Cleveland losing spirit. The Yankees are the team appointed by God to win against all odds; any team from Cleveland is somehow appointed by God to lose against all odds.
In both cases, the result somehow transcends the players’ skill, the manager’s abilities, the GM’s resources, the team’s health, and every other conceivable factor. It just is.
And yet, despite all the belief and mythology surrounding the Yankees, they are one game away from being drowned by the Texas Rangers—ironically, a team who has been doubted to date because the Rangers as a franchise had never won a playoff series or a home playoff game going into this year’s postseason. Weird how different players, including for my money the nastiest active starting pitcher in the game, will lead to different results.
Assuming the Rangers win one of the next three games, the Yankees’ loss will serve as a reminder that just as their supposed winning spirit can be blown apart, so can Cleveland’s supposed losing spirit. All it takes is the right combination of people. If you have that, then no amount of history or mythology matters.
On the other hand, if Texas blows this lead, forget I ever wrote this column.
-T
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