Basically the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s Yankees fans are spoiled by the successes of Jeter, Williams, Rivera and the Torre-Girardi dynasty.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion, but if your team needs to win the championship every year in order for it to stay relevant to you, you must have a very difficult time wrapping your head around how those of us who are fans of, say, the Brewers or the Mariners can possibly be fans of teams that, in most seasons, don’t even have a good chance of reaching .500.
We don’t have the luxury of being fair-weather fans, who lose interest in our teams if they aren’t perennial winners.
Not good in Steinbrenner’s view.
Strange logic. “We’ve been spoiled in the past, so we must remain continuously spoiled.”
The droughts make the championships so much sweeter, which is why 1996 is my favorite World Series.
As a Pirates fan, I’m playing the world’s smallest violin, rented especially for this occasion.
I feel sorry :dubious: for fans of any team who have such lofty expectations that anything short of national/world championships or at least making the finals of championship series is considered a failure and cause for bitching and lamentations.
Ohio State football fans may be even worse than Yankees fans in this regard.
Notre Dame fans are even worse as they come with smug moral superiority as well
For further perspective, the laughingstock Cubs have won a World Series more recently than the Yankees have. And in their first appearance since 1945.
Ditto my Kansas City Royals, whose 29-year playoff drought that ended shortly prior to that was quite the point of derision.
The competitive balance tax (aka the luxury tax) that baseball implemented seems to be working.
There was a slightly different model from 97-99. The revised model took effect for the 2003 season. The Yankees used to be able to dominate simply because they could wildly outspend other teams. Now part of what they spend feeds back to other teams. Throw in moneyball techniques where those poorer teams can maximize bang for their buck and we shouldn’t see the Yankees dominate like they used to.
MLB intentionally tried to create more balance with rules changes. It worked. Yankee fans should get used to the new normal.
Did it? Other than the team I root for (the Royals), what small market teams have won the World Series since implementation? The last 10 years have seen the following cities in the World Series:
Washington, DC
Houston (x2)
Boston (x2)
LA (Dodgers) (x2)
Chicago (Cubs)
Cleveland
Kansas City (x2)
New York (Mets)
San Francisco (x3)
St. Louis (x2)
Detroit
Dallas/Arlington (x2)
St. Louis is pretty small market, but they’ve also always been competitive. Detroit and Cleveland are pretty small, but they didn’t win. The Royals definitely moneyballed their way there - teams very quickly decided they all needed to spend big money on 3 dominant relievers and refocus on defense once KC made their run. (And the Royals never needed Yankee money - they had ownership with a bank vault of Walmart money at their disposal. They just never had the desire to spend it.)
Edit: I’m not implying that competitive balance measure were put in place in 2010 - I wasn’t looking to dig back much further.
On a tangential but related note, I really got pissed off at Ken Burns’ Baseball, when the film looked at the 1960 World Series. This is of course the series that was won for the Pirates by Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off homer in Game Seven. Burns had three or four New York fans lamenting how the Yankees could lose to the lowly and unworthy Pirates. Didn’t bother to find a single Pittsburgh fan to talk about how wonderful it must have been to see the Bucs take down the mighty Yanks.
Felt like the same attitude behind the OP - the Yankees are important, not like the insignificant Mariners, or Braves, or Indians. Me, I’m delighted to see a World Series devoid of navy pinstripes.
As other have noted, Burns also lovingly told the story of the Red Sox and talked a bit about Carl Yastrzemski (who never won a World Series) but never once mentioned Stan Musial (who did.) The first player mentioned in the documentary is Jackie Robinson; the next three are all Red Sox players, none of whom ever won a World Series.
The funny thing is that since then, the Red Sox have been one of the best and most important teams in baseball. But at the time he made the series (the early 1990s) the Red Sox were not an important franchise at all, and hadn’t been since the days of Babe Ruth.
Anyway, as is sadly the case with a lot of historians, Burns was also frequently careless with the facts when discussing baseball, so I have other bones to pick with him.
40% of the league made it into the World Series in that decade. The Yankees were not one of them despite having paid more in luxury tax than all other teams combined in the current system. The Yankees have been in 40 Series since 1903. That is the total of the Dodgers and Giants appearances of 20 each. The Yankees could just spend their way into frequent World Series appearances before. Now they can’t.
Now that does not mean things are perfectly balanced where any team can realistically dream of the World Series. Money still matters. Some teams are regularly not close to spending the limit before the luxury tax kicks in. Money matters less than it did before, though. The largest market teams, especially the Yankees, got pushed down a notch and are closer to the rest of the other above average market teams.
I would define that as working. It certainly addresses the OP even if you don’t like that definition.
When it comes to documentaries, Ken Burns is in a league of his own. A real heavy hitter. But when he stepped up to bat, out of left field the tells the story of one of the greatest game-seven wins in World Series history from the perspective of poor Goliath. I guess he was trying to cover all the bases, but when a story’s teed up for you like that, you just have to knock out of the park. Burns caught me off-base with that curve ball. A swing and a miss. He really dropped the. . . he dropped something.
Does it, really? I mean, money has usually mattered, but did it matter MORE before?
If we are defining “money” as “the Yankees winning the World Series” then I guess money mattered more in 1996-2009 than it did before. But even in that period, the Marlins won the World Series twice, St. Louis won one, and the poorer Chicago cousin won. How do you define money winning, anyway? Is it how much a team spends on salaries, or the size of the market? Do we go by championships, or playoff appearances? Does money matter based on who wins… or who loses?
Who loses is surely just as important, and the evidence suggests money matters a LOT. Depending who you believe, the ten smallest MLB media markets are more or less:
Cincinnati
Kansas City
Milwaukee
San Diego
Baltimore
Pittsburgh
St. Louis
Cleveland
Colorado
Miami
Tampa/St. Pete is a bigger market than people realize but let’s add them as an honorary member, since it’s a bad market for other reasons. Most of those teams have made the playoffs at least once since 2009, and two have actually won the World Series, but for the most part this is not a list of successful teams. Miami and Tamp Bay are essentially broken, actually.
I don’t see how things are getting better. Even in the 1996-2009 timeframe, when the Yankees won it all five times, Miami/Florida won it twice, St. Louis won it, and the bottom market teams were pretty much just as successful in making the playoffs and winning pennants. (It wouldn’t be quite the same eleven teams - Baltimore was a medium market until DC arrived, Tampa Bay did not exist until 1998, etc.) If we look at, say, the 14 seasons prior to that, 1982-1995, market size was of very little apparent importance at all - championshipsby large markets were the exception, with really only the Mets in 1986, Dodgers in 1988, and Blue Jays in 1992 and 1993 being large market wins.
The 14 years prior to that, 1967-1981, even with the Yankees winning twice, and the Mets once, again it’s hard to identify that large markets had a huge advantage. The Reds and Pirates, even then two small markets, both won the World Series twice and had many other playoff appearances. Oakland won three in a row despite the fact that their attendance still sucked. (In 1974, in the midst of winning their thrid straight, they were second to last in the AL in attendance.)
To my eyes it’s hard to justify the claim that money matters less now. It appears to matter as much as it ever has. You can’t base that claim just on the Yankees not winning the Series since 2009; the fact they’ve horked it up in the playoffs doesn’t mitigate the fact they usually make the playoffs - in the ten seasons since 2009 they have made the playoffs seven times. San Diego sure as hell hasn’t.
Yankees won a lot of world series prior to the 60s when there was no draft to spread talent around. And there were fewer teams then.
Okay, so I wasn’t the only one to think Baseball was all about the Yankees, Red Sox, New York Giants, and Brooklyn Dodgers.
Yeah, I enjoyed the film, especially Burns telling the under-recognized story of the Negro League. But it was heavily, heavily slanted towards the Northeastern teams. Sure, the Red Sox are a little more important to the history of baseball than, say, the Colorado Rockies. But they’re not more significant than the Reds, or the Cardinals, or the Cubs.