In the midst of their flap with the New York Yankees over rescheduling a game delayed by Hurricane Irene, the Baltimore Orioles signalled their annoyance by letting their communications director do the bulk of the chastising.
“Are we really still talking about this?” Orioles PR boss Greg Bader wrote to ESPN. “We’ve got people out there literally trying to put their lives back together and yet there are some still worrying about a rescheduled game time?”
It’s one thing for a rival GM or manager to spank baseball’s East Coast Ottoman Empire. It’s another thing for the guy who writes the press releases to do it.
The real world equivalent is me sending my 6-year-old over to your house to lecture you about property rights after you parked in the mutual driveway.
At first, the Yankees wanted the game shoehorned into the dead zone between the end of the season and the start of the playoffs. The implication was that fifth-place Baltimore’s feelings about sticking around an extra day to give the Yankees a pointless cool-down contest were irrelevant. It will now be played on one of New York’s two remaining off days.
Just try to put yourself into their shoes — playing baseball nearly every day for a month! That’s more than 80 hours of work. Someone get a clairvoyant to Yankee Stadium — we need to summon the ghost of Cesar Chavez.
This unusual confrontation shows how firmly baseball has returned to one of its upstairs-downstairs moments. The Yankees own the mansion. The Orioles, they seem to feel, are their footmen.
Only one of the eight teams currently in a playoff position sits in the bottom half of MLB’s payroll rankings. The three favourites rolling toward October — the Yankees, Phillies and Red Sox — stand first, second and third on that list. The Angels — still very much in the hunt in the AL West — are fourth.
The outlier squad is the Milwaukee Brewers. They’ve constructed a marvelous season in baseball’s weak sister division, but will lose their biggest star, Prince Fielder, to free agency this winter. So before they turn their eyes back to sports’ greatest beneficiaries of parity, the Green Bay Packers, Wisconsin should enjoy its baseball while it can.
It’s pointless to complain about the lack of a real salary cap (the luxury tax works about as well in baseball as sin taxes work in normal life). However, the reality of the divide will loom larger and larger in this city as we pass through the hopeful phase of the Blue Jays’ development and into an extended period of expectation.
The proposed addition of a wild-card slot in each league will grease that transition enormously. If the American League has five playoff spots open next year, that moment will have arrived in this town. Workmanlike .500 seasons and a few individual star turns will no longer be enough.
For the last decade, the meta questions facing the Jays have operated in a predictable pattern.
Off-season: What’s the GM doing?
Regular season: What did the GM do wrong?
http://www.thestar.com/sports/baseball/ ... next-level
