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COPYRIGHT 2001 Sporting News Publishing Co.
A desperate, cry for some team--any team--to deliver baseball from the Bronx Bombers, whose unrelenting championship hold is dispiriting, to say the least
Are you listening, Boston? Can you hear me, Oakland? How 'bout it, White Sox? Braves, are yotl interested? Mets? Cardinals?
I'm waiting.
It's come to this. Didn't want to have to do it, but baseball has exhausted the other alternatives. Nobody seems to be able to beat the Yankees using more conventional metals, so it's last-resort time. Time to do another deal with the Devil. It worked once before back in 1955, at least on stage, when Damn Yankees took Broadway by storm. In that fascinating bit of Faustian fiction, a long-suffering fan named Joe Boyd sells his soul to become pitching-and-hitting phenom Joe Hardy and win the pennant for the Washington Senators.
At the time, the Yankees were in the middle of one of their dynasties. During a 12-year stretch from 1947 to 1958, they won eight Word Series championships. And in 1954, Douglas Wallop published The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the novel on which Damn Yankees is based.
So here are the Yankees of 2001, winners of three in a row and four out of the last five World Series and muscling up to do it again. They're back, just like Freddy Krueger on Elm Street. They're back, looking stronger and better. They're back; and as spring training winds down and the season sets to open, no team in either league is clearly positioned to foil them.
Not without the kind of help I'm proposing, anyway. Where have you gone, Joe Hardy? Apparently, it's going to take another bargain with Beelzebub to stop the Yankees this time, so I volunteer. Take my soul.
Nothin' against the Yankees as people. They're as fine a bunch as you'd ever want to introduce to your unmarried little sister. But haven't we seen enough? Admit it: It's getting tedious, watching them win. I know I'm not the only fan in North America who is ... dare I say it? Freakin' tired of them.
"Everybody is," says White Sox manager Jerry Manuel. "Everybody wants that ring."
"Everybody wants to win a world championship," says Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez. "But the Yankees keep disappointing us."
"Hey," replies Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, smug and smiling. "That's our job."
It's time for a change, even if it takes eternal damnation to bring it about. The thing is, nobody can figure out how to beat the Yankees legitimately, so we're left to try other devices, such as the mind-boggling $252 million deal the Rangers gave Rodriguez last winter. Come to think of it, some management critics of Rodriguez's ceiling-busting salary might suggest Texas has its own pact with the Prince of Darkness, because that contract is giving other teams' front offices a devil of a time with their own payrolls. Everybody's best players want A-Rod money now.
But even Rangers general manager Doug Melvin, who gets to match Rodriguez against the Yankees for the next 10 seasons, doesn't figure Texas can topple them, at least not right away.
"How do you beat 'em? Have Mahano Rivera fail the physical," says Melvin. "That'd be a good first step."
But, of course, that didn't happen. Rivera is as healthy as a horse. In fact, he signed a new contract with the Yankees early in spring training, which means one of the game's best closers will stay in pinstripes to bewitch hitters with his cut fastball for another four years. Neither the Rangers nor anyone else will be beating the Yankees in the ninth inning very often before 2005.
Rivera could have been a free agent after this season; in today's market, he most...
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