Baseball Is Bad for the Yankees

All over sports talk radio, bored hosts are asking, "Are the Yankees bad for baseball?" I don't watch baseball and I only know what the Yankees have done this offseason because they've now spent over $400 million on three players, a fact Yankees homers and Yankee-haters alike can't seem to realize isn't a guarantee of a World Series title. But I don't need to watch games to know there are better questions to be asked. Namely, has the decline of baseball, as in, its ability to represent a conflict of the facts and ideals which rule the non-baseball lives of its audience, ruined the most-recognized sports brand in the world?

I want to submit that modern baseball, unlike football, no longer succeeds in isolating itself from the realities of the circulation of capital--realities of the circulation of capital from which spectator sports can be an escape. Max Kellerman said in a broadcast earlier in the week that rather than anger being directed at the Yankees, it should be directed at the Red Sox, a team that spends far more per capita regarding the population of Boston than the Yankees. It's not a good argument--however much Kellerman likes to think of himself as intellectual shaman to the Zeitgeist of the national sports scene--but it does reveal how indelible is the mark of specific geographical conditions on baseball teams. "The Yankees deserve to be great because they represent a great city, because New York is the ultimate proving ground for talent"--both perceptions actually resulting from the concentration of capital in New York.

The Detroit Lions' present woes offer an interesting comparison. How many people think the Lions deserve to lose because of the hard times which have fallen on the auto industry? I think most football fans would rather the Lions have won on Sunday, thus avoiding the absolute infamy of 0-16 (absolute at least until the NFL season expands to 18 games). Yet the Kansas City Royals are symbols of unfortunate no-talents, and, at least in the sports press of Chicago and New York, that doesn't seem to ruffle any feathers. Am I blinded by recent isolation in major cities? Or does love of the Yankees, unlike, perhaps, love of the Cowboys, mean embracing New York and its peculiar accidents of prosperity?