Posts Tagged ‘baseball’

Yankees fans, congratulations on your 27th world championship. I’m sure I’ll be hearing about it not only for the rest of the winter, but all through next year and until the next World Series is won, and if the Yankees don’t win that one, I’ll keep hearing about how they should have. Yadda yadda.

My issue is not that the Yankees won; it is how they won.  At the risk of taking this beyond sports, how the Yankees won and have won over the past two decades bridges to a great social divide about how success can be achieved in our society.

Obviously, if you have an unlimited source of funds, money can buy you anything. In a realm, such as sports, where a championship is the measure of success, having an unlimited source of money to achieve that success when the competition does not is inequitable at best.

If a professional league cannot provide an equal opportunity for achievement (aka salary caps), in my opinion, it should not be considered a professional league because a majority of the teams competing in that league fundamentally do not have the opportunity to achieve success.

I’m not saying it is only the Yankees creating this situation…it is other teams as well, but when comparing baseball to the other major professional sports, there is less parity in baseball than any other sport, and that is because of the lack of a salary cap.

I’m not saying this out of being a Yankee hater. I don’t like the Yankees, being that I grew up in Queens as a Mets fan and adopted the Marlins as my team when I moved to Florida, but my point is not to bash them because they are the Yankees…it is the greater social implication.

The point is, the way MLB as a league and baseball as a sport is run, it is a representation of the political views of some to win at all costs, even if winning means making the system unfair to those less fortunate. I don’t believe that is the right way in any situation…in sports, or in life in general.

As I prepare for my first fantasy baseball draft of the 2009 season later this afternoon, I have a confession to make.  I, David Feinman, have been taking performance-enhancing drugs to inflate my statistics, and therefore, my success in fantasy baseball.

I’ve just been under so much pressure these past years.  I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for over a decade, and eventually I rose to a level where I needed to perform at an even higher level.  My fans, and the teams I was playing against in my fantasy leagues over the years, expected me to accrue these stats, and I was not capable on my own of reaching that level, so I cheated.  I chose players for my rosters, like Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettitte and Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds, who were using steroids to enhance their statistics and fool the fans into thinking they were better then they actually are.  In that way, I inflated my stats as well, and thus the success of my fantasy baseball teams, and while I was unaware that I was doing anything illegal or immoral, I am truly sorry.  Fantasy baseball, like the game of baseball itself, should be played on an even playing field.

I can’t correct the err of my ways over the past years, but as this season approaches, I take a vow to not draft anyone on any of my teams who is known to have used performance-enhancing drugs in the past or who is seriously suspected of doing so.  My teams might suck as a result, and with that list of 103 more players who tested positive waiting to be released, I may still end up with a few, but as a baseball purist, I can at least feel that I did it the right way.

Here’s to honest play, last place, and hoping Alex Rodriguez and the rest of them don’t ever get into the Baseball Hall of Fame.