Friday, March 28, 2008

99% of Baseball Reporters are Members of Red Sox Nation

Rant time -

The anti-Yankee media bias is once again driving me nuts. There are 2 kinds of Yankee-killing pieces. The first is the kind that attempts to have a reason why the Yanks stink and the Sox are the best team ever. From Yahoo -

(the Sox are)...one of the best rosters in recent memory. Better than the Yankees, who are counting heavily on young pitchers and aging position players...

Sanity check -

Starting lineup average age Yanks - 28.7 years; Sox - 28.4 years

Rotation average age Yanks - 29.0 years; Sox - 29.0 years

(I included the older Yankee lineup with Hmat at DH and Giambi at 1B. If you put Duncan at DH the Yankee lineup is actually 28.1 years average - younger than the Sox'!)

Both teams employ older veterans, veterans in their prime, and youngsters in both the lineup and rotation. How is the Yanks situation age-wise any different from Boston's?

In the rotation you have one dependable, pretty much know-what-you're-gonna-get kind of guy - Becket and Wang (for all those who believe Beckett is sooo much better than Wang and is the definition of 'Ace,' click here); one probably too old veteran: Wakefield and Moose; one solid with question marks: Dice-k and Pettitte; and 2 kids with huge potential: Lester and Buchholz for the Sox, and Phil and Ikky for the Yanks.

The second kind of Yankee media slaughter is the 'because-I-said-so' piece.

From Fox Sports' Ian O'Connor

Now up is down and east is west. The Red Sox represent the world's leading superpower, and the Yankees only lead the league in one offensive category: wages paid.

Any transition period in the Bronx could be measured against the expansion of a dynasty in Boston.

More than anything, Hank and Girardi need to identify a vulnerability, an area of attack, in a New England program beginning to look as frighteningly efficient as Bill Belichick's

But they can't be taken seriously as a World Series favorite, not when the Red Sox are still dressing David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, and still growing young prospects like Jonathan Papelbon, Jacoby Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia, and still employing their former Marlins ace, Josh Beckett, after the Yankees had to write off theirs, Carl Pavano.

Wow - no hyperbole there, huh?

Red Sox are the leading superpower, a Dynasty, frighteningly efficient and have Ortiz, Ramirez, Paplepuss, Ellsbury and Pedroia, while the Yanks are vastly overpaid and have...Carl Pavano.

There are a couple of fair statistical agruments one could make to claim the Sox are better than the Yanks (all, of course, wrong). But when all you say is "The Yanks suck and the Sox rule," there's not much to hook your teeth into to make a counter argument, is there?

You'd figure after 40 years of being a Yankee fan I would get used to it. Even in the 80's and early 90's when the Yanks really did stink the media spent an undue amount of time reveling in the Yanks failures and pointing out just how bad they were.

At least now I have a blog where I can post rants about it...

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