The Mangler On Sports

Well, my prediction that the Yankees would beat the Tigers was wrong, and I couldn't be happier. The biggest joke in professional sports just reached a new low this weekend, bowing out to the Tigers 3-1. After taking the opener, the Yankees "invincible" batting line-up scored only 6 more runs in the rest of the series, and three of those were meaningless tallies at the end of the deciding game. The approximately $45 million trio of Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi each had one hit in the opening game and were hitless the rest of the way. Gary Sheffield and Bobby Abreu were irrelevent, as was Johnny Damon who was pirated away from Boston after he burned the Yankees in the 2004 post-season. All those big bats proved useless, because Yankee GM Bryan Cashman somehow manages to spend double what his nearest competitor spends without acquiring any reliable pitching. The addage that "pitching wins championships" is reinforced year after year, but ignored by New York. Aside from veteran Mike Mussina and young Chien-Ming Wang, the Yanks were sending question marks to the mound. Looking back, it was fairly easy to see that the Tigers only needed to beat one of those two (Mussina, in game 2) to have a very good chance at winning the series. I figured that Detroit's pitchers, while clearly better than New York's, were tired and the Yankees would be able to slug their way past them. As I said, pitching wins championships, but hitting can often win in the earlier rounds. The Tigers were a sub-.400 ball club for the last six weeks of the season, and lost five in a row heading into the playoffs. The Yankees, meanwhile, had pummelled Boston in mid-August to take control of the division and never looked back. Even after several years of disappointment in the playoffs, this appeared to be a series that the Yankees just wouldn't let slip away. But lo and behold, almost everyone in their line-up slumped/choked at the same time and the Yankees went down with a wimper and all baseball fans of good conscience can rejoice.

$976 000 000: The amount of money the Yankees have spent on players over the last 6 years, nearly a billion dollars.

0: The number of World Series championships they have won in that same stretch.

3-10: The post-season win-loss record of the Yankees after they demolished Boston 19-8 in game 3 of the 2004 ALCS, which gave them an "insurmountable" 3-0 series advantage. Maybe the Curse of the Bambino has reversed itself.