Bosoxwest wrote:

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mredsox89 wrote:

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I hate the Yanks as much as anyone. But I'm not going to do anything more than congratulate them. They spend the most money, Cashman even said that the win was because of their payroll. The Sox need to spend if they want to catch up with the Yankees. Luckily, the Yankee team is old, and will always be old, and the back end of almost every contract they owe is absolutely terrible. The Sox have been able to lock up players through their prime, not 4 years after it.

I congratulate the Yanks and move on to the 09/10 offseason

I congratulate you for taking the high road, but I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. The Yankees are valued at $1.5B dollars. That is nearly $700M more than the Sox. Even with their bloated payroll it accounts to a spend of $27 per Nielson household. The Sox spend is at $50.5 per household. The Brewers are at $88.5 per household, which given their local economy cannot stand, obviously. These dollars actually represent the fans' spending. In short, smaller market teams like the Brewers and Reds, who are atop the spend list, are maxed out in a failing, almost pathetic given the results, "GFIN" bid. The Sox are probably fairly close to their sustainable threshold if we can give them credit for understanding their business. The Yankees are on cruise control.

I understand that this is a Sox board, and so the context is what it is. But I want to point out that it's probably easier for us to give them credit for spending as was required to buy a championship because we have the luxury of a pretty big payroll ourselves and the recent memory of having won a series. In short, we have hope, and naturally we want to justify the Sox' spending. But for small-market fans, the system is rightly perceived as rigged beyond all hope. They really should hate the Yankees (and they include the Red Sox in their acrimony of course) even more than we do; we just hate them more due to the history and because we actually get to see so many abhorrent Yankee fans in person. If you can't buy a championship, the only other way to do it is the Rays Way: tank for a decade. Something does need to change.

I do give the Yankees credit for more or less playing to their abilities. Nobody on that team pulled a Howard and simply disappeared into the earth, and they didn't have any crippling boneheaded plays, a la LAA and Philly. They were a better team, and they didn't cough it up. But I'm not willing to credit them with winning on a level playing field. Shit, if I'm honest with myself, I am probably using the 86-year wait as rationale to balance guilt about the Sox's championships given their payroll in relation to some of the teams they beat.