People of America, please watch this World Series!! Most of the time, when fun, upstart teams like these make it to the Fall Classic, no one watches.
Please don’t let the fact that the Red Sox and the Yankees aren’t playing this year keep you from watching. Enough with letting ESPN create this ridiculous good vs. evil mythology that play the gritty Red Sox against the evil empire of the Yankees. The Red Sox are not gritty, they are not the anti-Yankees. If the Yankees are Hitler, the Red Sox are Stalin. If the Yankees took a few years off from baseball, the Red Sox would be the Yankees. So, get over the Yankees, we get it, it’s hip to hate them… the jokes have all been told, we can all pretend that if your team started spending tons of money you would disown them based on principle, we can pretend like you have a moral leg to stand on when bitching about the Yankees payroll while your team’s owners get a free pass for taking profits and buying yachts instead of players. Still, there is nothing you can do about it, move on and realize there is more to baseball life than Yankee hatred.
Also, move on with your life and get over the Red Sox and the bizarre false mythology surrounding them, they spent $52 dollars just for the rights to talk to Dice-K, they don’t fit into the blue-collar, scrappy, low-budget category. The Yankees payroll is an amazing $206 million, the most in baseball, guess who clocks in at #2, those scrappy Red Sox at $162. The Red Sox are not the cure for baseball’s ills, you know who is? That’s right, the Rangers and the Giants.
Last year, ESPN talked an awful lot about the disparity between the Yanks payroll and that of the Phils. With the disparity being a comparison of $201 million to $113 million that’s more than fair right? Well, yeah, a Yankee shopping spree looks like the baseball equivalent of a round of Supermarket Sweep. My issue is that no one talked about payroll the year before, when the Phillies ($98 million) played the Rays ($43 million). Yep, the Phillies payroll more than doubled that of the Rays. If you all feel so strongly about payroll fairness, everyone should have been pulling for the Rays, it was a veritable David vs. Goliath story… instead ratings were sad, down somewhere between 17% and 25% for most games from the previous year.
Well, this year we get another shot at making things right. Although, this is more like David vs. slightly wealthier David. True, the Giants did start the year with a payroll of $97 million to the Rangers $55, but since opening day the Rangers have added Cliff Lee and like $90 million of the Giants cash is being dumped down the Zito toilet.
Neither of these teams was expected to make the playoffs by most, and yet, here they are in the World Series! Each team beat last year’s league champs to get this far! At the start of the year, the Rangers ranked 27 out of 30 in total payroll… 27 of 30!!!!
Watch this series!
Cliff Lee is probably the best playoff pitcher any of us will ever get to see, it’s superhuman how good he is. There is also a fair chance he’ll be on that Yankees team you hate so much next year, so root for him now while you still can. You’ll like it, trust me.
And sure, you all know Josh Hamilton, but Nelson Cruz is a monster, outside of Hanley Ramirez, he is probably the best player most of the country has never heard of.
And Tim Lincecum may look like a 14 year old girl, but he pitches like some sort of mythological god. The dude strikes someone out about as frequently as Glenn Beck says something bat-shit crazy. He’s as much fun to watch pitch as literally anyone I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched a lot of fucking baseball.
Please, America, do me this solid. Watch this World Series. For like five minutes, forget all that garbage that ESPN has brainwashed you into believing about the only teams that matter being your favorite team, the Red Sox and the Yankees, and realize that if you want anti-Yankees, they aren’t the Sawx, they are the two teams about to square off for all the marbles.
