andyfox
10-25-2004, 01:03 AM
By Stefan Fatsis in Friday's Wall Street Journal:
Now that reality has trumped fiction, now that the unthinkable has been thunk, the Boston Red Sox, and all of baseball, should thank the franchise that made it possible.
Yes, the New York Yankees.
After the greatest comeback in 101 years of postseason play, achieved against an archrival whose success has framed their failure, this might seem like a silly time for the Red Sox or anyone else to sing hosannas to the fallen bullies from the Bronx.
But the dastardly hegemony of the Yankees the past decade—which nothing that happened this week changes—is the reason New England is celebrating its team’s first World Series appearance since 1986. Boston may have just buried Caesar, but it should praise him, too.
The longstanding conventional wisdom about the Yankees—and it has applied in different forms as far back as the 1930s—is that the market-crushing Bronx Bombers are very bad for baseball. The Yankees produce way more revenue than anyone else—around $300 million this year, at least $50 million more than the Red Sox. So they spend way more on players than anyone else--$185 million this year, $60 million more than the second-place Red Sox. And that’s just not fair.
George Steinbrenner’s profligacy, though, is precisely what turned a terrific rivalry into baseball Armageddon. In fact, I’d argue that just about every innovation in baseball in the past few years—and there have been a lot—can be traced to the need to combat an ever bigger and badder New York. By steamrolling everyone at the bank, the Yankees have helped force hidebound baseball to do what it was incapable of doing for decades: change.
In the real world, this happens all the time. “If you can’t play the same game that the winner is playing, you go to a niche or you go to ground,” says Richard Schmalensee, dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who testified for Microsoft during recent federal antitrust battles but is a Red Sox fan.
Baseball isn’t real life, though, so teams spent the 1990s whining about New York’s growing advantage. In 1996, when the Yankees won their first World Series in 18 years, their $61 million payroll was $6 million more than the next highest. The Yankees’ outlays soared, but some clubs stayed close. As recently as 2001, the Los Angels Dodgers spent the same $121 million as New York. The Red Sox tripled their payroll in five years to keep up.
Competing at the ATM
As sportswriter Buster Olney notes in his book “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty,” only when New York’s payroll hit $150 million in 2002 did other clubs decides not to bother trying to compete at the ATM. Now baseball has New York and Boston and a vastly more competitive middle class, with budget-conscious payrolls of $50 million to $90 million.
The Yankees’ dominance also forced teams “to sit down and evaluate the rules,” says Keith Law, special assistant to the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, a Harvard grad and Carnegie Mellon MBA who’s one of baseball’s smart, young new execs. “Within this construct, what’s the most efficient strategy?”
So progressive teams have retooled front offices, dumped baseball lifers and unclogged scouting bureaucracies. They have drafted more college players to have big-league workers sooner. They’ve forsaken overpriced, underproducing mid-career players. They’ve hired stat wonks whose ideas were shunned for decades.
Guess what? Despite giving more than $630 million to players, Boss George hasn’t won a World Series since 2000.
Would this progress have occurred had the Yankees been the plodders of the pre-free agency 1960s or the senseless spenders of the 1980s? Some of it, sure; the stakes are higher for everyone these days. But New York’s monopoly-like performance—since 1995, 10 playoff appearances, eight division titles, six American League pennants and four World Series championships—woke up the rest of the sport.
No one more than the Red Sox. The cursed ones for decades were run by uninspired (or worse) management, sometimes on the field, usually in the front office, always in the owner’s suite. That changed when the current owners forked over $700 million in 2002 and overhauled the franchise. The team’s president, Larry Lucchino, dubbed the Yankees the “Evil Empire,” reigniting the rivalry, drawing permanent attention to New York’s bottomless pockets and casting the almost-as-loaded Red Sox as sling-shotting Davids.
Damn Yankees, Damn good strategy. Baseball will tax New York to the tune of around $85 million this year—more than the payroll of all but eight teams. It will luxuriate in record attendance—10% of it from Yankees games. It will reap millions from merchandise sales—a third of it from Yankees stuff. It will tally its playoff TV ratings and boast about the game’s greatness.
So congrats, Red Sox Nation. The Bambino and his curse are on life support; if the Sox don’t blow the World Series, you can pull the plug. But don’t forget” The Yankees are still everyone’s daddy. They just can’t win ‘em all.
Now that reality has trumped fiction, now that the unthinkable has been thunk, the Boston Red Sox, and all of baseball, should thank the franchise that made it possible.
Yes, the New York Yankees.
After the greatest comeback in 101 years of postseason play, achieved against an archrival whose success has framed their failure, this might seem like a silly time for the Red Sox or anyone else to sing hosannas to the fallen bullies from the Bronx.
But the dastardly hegemony of the Yankees the past decade—which nothing that happened this week changes—is the reason New England is celebrating its team’s first World Series appearance since 1986. Boston may have just buried Caesar, but it should praise him, too.
The longstanding conventional wisdom about the Yankees—and it has applied in different forms as far back as the 1930s—is that the market-crushing Bronx Bombers are very bad for baseball. The Yankees produce way more revenue than anyone else—around $300 million this year, at least $50 million more than the Red Sox. So they spend way more on players than anyone else--$185 million this year, $60 million more than the second-place Red Sox. And that’s just not fair.
George Steinbrenner’s profligacy, though, is precisely what turned a terrific rivalry into baseball Armageddon. In fact, I’d argue that just about every innovation in baseball in the past few years—and there have been a lot—can be traced to the need to combat an ever bigger and badder New York. By steamrolling everyone at the bank, the Yankees have helped force hidebound baseball to do what it was incapable of doing for decades: change.
In the real world, this happens all the time. “If you can’t play the same game that the winner is playing, you go to a niche or you go to ground,” says Richard Schmalensee, dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who testified for Microsoft during recent federal antitrust battles but is a Red Sox fan.
Baseball isn’t real life, though, so teams spent the 1990s whining about New York’s growing advantage. In 1996, when the Yankees won their first World Series in 18 years, their $61 million payroll was $6 million more than the next highest. The Yankees’ outlays soared, but some clubs stayed close. As recently as 2001, the Los Angels Dodgers spent the same $121 million as New York. The Red Sox tripled their payroll in five years to keep up.
Competing at the ATM
As sportswriter Buster Olney notes in his book “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty,” only when New York’s payroll hit $150 million in 2002 did other clubs decides not to bother trying to compete at the ATM. Now baseball has New York and Boston and a vastly more competitive middle class, with budget-conscious payrolls of $50 million to $90 million.
The Yankees’ dominance also forced teams “to sit down and evaluate the rules,” says Keith Law, special assistant to the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, a Harvard grad and Carnegie Mellon MBA who’s one of baseball’s smart, young new execs. “Within this construct, what’s the most efficient strategy?”
So progressive teams have retooled front offices, dumped baseball lifers and unclogged scouting bureaucracies. They have drafted more college players to have big-league workers sooner. They’ve forsaken overpriced, underproducing mid-career players. They’ve hired stat wonks whose ideas were shunned for decades.
Guess what? Despite giving more than $630 million to players, Boss George hasn’t won a World Series since 2000.
Would this progress have occurred had the Yankees been the plodders of the pre-free agency 1960s or the senseless spenders of the 1980s? Some of it, sure; the stakes are higher for everyone these days. But New York’s monopoly-like performance—since 1995, 10 playoff appearances, eight division titles, six American League pennants and four World Series championships—woke up the rest of the sport.
No one more than the Red Sox. The cursed ones for decades were run by uninspired (or worse) management, sometimes on the field, usually in the front office, always in the owner’s suite. That changed when the current owners forked over $700 million in 2002 and overhauled the franchise. The team’s president, Larry Lucchino, dubbed the Yankees the “Evil Empire,” reigniting the rivalry, drawing permanent attention to New York’s bottomless pockets and casting the almost-as-loaded Red Sox as sling-shotting Davids.
Damn Yankees, Damn good strategy. Baseball will tax New York to the tune of around $85 million this year—more than the payroll of all but eight teams. It will luxuriate in record attendance—10% of it from Yankees games. It will reap millions from merchandise sales—a third of it from Yankees stuff. It will tally its playoff TV ratings and boast about the game’s greatness.
So congrats, Red Sox Nation. The Bambino and his curse are on life support; if the Sox don’t blow the World Series, you can pull the plug. But don’t forget” The Yankees are still everyone’s daddy. They just can’t win ‘em all.