OPINION:
So the New York Yankees — for the 17th year in a row and the 25th of the past 26 years — have failed to win the World Series.
For an ordinary team, that would pretty much be par for the course. Each year, 29 Major League Baseball teams fail to win the World Series. Many of them have not won a World Series in the past 25 or 30 years. In most cases, those teams have played to their expectations.
For the Yankees, however, the expectations are always that they will win the World Series, with good reason. Their success in the past 100 years or so, the fact that they have won more pennants and World Series than any other baseball team, and their annual commitment to spending as much money as necessary all seem to be testament to their desire to remain competitive.
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Maybe they are not really all that interested in winning championships.
Since George Steinbrenner died, team ownership — his children, now looking for private equity partners — seems much more interested in cash flow than in victories. It is no accident that the demise of the Yankees over the past generation has its origin in the demise of Steinbrenner, under whose leadership the Yankees won seven World Series, and the ascendance of his sons, who won no World Series.
Once ownership became obsessed with building and moving to a new stadium — where they could charge confiscatory prices for tickets and suites — their interest migrated from fielding a team that could win the World Series every year to fielding a team that played just well enough to justify some of the highest ticket prices in the league.
Yankees fans, blinded by nostalgia, have played along with this crazy and wrong notion that if you keep doing what you have been doing, you will eventually get different results.
For example, the general manager of baseball operations has presided over numerous failures in the past generation. Despite all that failure, his job seems secure; no one is talking about firing him. Indeed, he is routinely lauded by his peers as among the most competent general managers in the game.
The current manager has won precisely zero championships, despite having managed the Yankees for nine seasons — longer than anyone in the modern era except for Joe Torre, Joe Girardi and Joe McCarthy, who won four, one and seven World Series, respectively.
Nevertheless, as recently as a few days ago, Aaron Judge said that everyone should be brought back and do it all again next year. I guess he thinks getting shown the door in the early rounds of the playoffs is the best that he deserves.
It is difficult to watch the train wreck that is the Yankees organization — bloated, self-satisfied, indifferent to performance, focused on cash more than winning, living on a reputation earned by other people — and not draw parallels to significant chunks of American society.
Think about the federal government, and the match is spot on. The bureaucracy is pretty self-satisfied, despite the fact that it has been a while since it has done much for the taxpayer. Think about the military. We spend a lot on defense — more than the next nine nations combined. What is our record over the past three generations?
Perhaps a good comparison is the educational system, which spends trillions of dollars and turns out an alarmingly poorly educated populace while remaining serenely confident in its own performance.
One could go on almost indefinitely, but the point is easily made and easily understood. If you have become accustomed to mediocrity, if you see that those who own the game — whether it be baseball or government — are taking money from you with no intention of succeeding, if the trap of nostalgia has compromised your ability to face reality, then you might want to rethink some of your assumptions and attachments.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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