Texeir-ing The Wealth

You may have detected, if you truly read between the lines of some of my posts on this blog, some faint undertones of animosity towards the New York Yankees. You may remember that as the Empire wrapped up its offseason spending spree, I was there every step of the way, compromising my journalistic integrity in order to take highly partisan swipes at every Bostonian's favorite punching bag.

But it's a new year now, and if I had thought to make any new year's resolutions, it seems possible that one of them could have been a pledge to be more mature and open-minded. So, in the spirit of that hypothetical non-resolution, I thought I'd give the Pinstripes a chance and try to play devil's advocate. Sure, I found their winter free-agent binge disgusting as it unfolded. But now, as I examine it with fresh, fair-minded 2009 eyes, could it be possible that the Yankees' ridiculous spending was actually good for baseball? Can the unjustifiable be justified?

I'm not sure how much I actually believe this, but--maybe. It all goes back to the function that baseball--and sports overall--are supposed to serve in our lives. Some would argue that sports is about poetry, about superhuman feats that reveal some kind of unique deeper meaning. But I think sports is mostly about escapism. That's why baseball games are on at 7, and football games are on weekends--when we come home from work, or when we have a day off, we want something a little bit outside our lives to think about for a while. And, as I've said before, baseball stays the same as our country changes, which means that our teams are always there to reassure us.

And it just so happens that, in 2008, there was a lot to escape from. Mostly, it was the economy, which transitioned rapidly from our national strength into something truly frightening. It was surprisingly jarring for me to read articles about how the economic crisis might end up affecting teams' spending. Baseball teams, I felt, are institutions that are supposed to be immune from that kind of thing. We won't be able to turn on the game to escape from the economic crisis if it follows us into the TV.

And then, a few months later, it was the Yankees who stood up and expanded their payroll to reassert their sport's invulnerability. Sure, they monopolized the available talent and eroded just a little more of baseball's rapidly disappearing competitive fairness. But in its own way, it's almost admirable--who has flown in the face of our country's biggest current threat more than the New York Yankees? In outspending all 29 other teams combined by almost a 2-to-1 margin, at least they reassured us all that, for some teams, our sports could continue to exist apart from reality, as they had before the crisis began. While it may be somewhat obnoxious, the Yankees are just doing what they've always done. And that's exactly what baseball is for.