Out with the Old, In with the Old

I don’t talk enough about baseball.  I think I start off every piece I do on ball saying that but its true.  I could have talked about Biogenisis but other than bashing A-fraud over and over and over and over and over and over and over and ov…you get it.  Other than doing that and also bashing Lyan Braun over and over and over and over and over and over and over and oh yeah I just did this schtick.  But you get the point, it just would have been a rant about how disgusting these *insert many expletives here* guys are.  Plus, I’m not that qualified to get into the nuts and bolts of it.  I’m probably not qualified to talk about most things I do, but I’m REALLY not qualified to discuss that.

So I’ll discuss the Dodgers and the Yankees.  Ohhhhh how I fondly remember the 81 World Series.  Fernando mania, Dave Winfield struggling to produce, the Dodgers coming back from down 2-0 to win the series, actually I was still a year away from being concieved but still I do know a bit about it.  Maybe Brucie was watching, if you follow me on twitter than you know how ridiculous my memory is!  But the point here is that those 2 teams met in 3 World Series in 5 years and are the 2 most storied organizations in baseball.

I don’t even know if any of you reading this know a world where the Dodgers are among the elite in baseball.  I know it is foreign territory to me even though I’m well aware of it.  Even when they won their last World Series in 88, they were a very good organization but no longer the power house of they had been basically forever!  But those days appear to be over with now.  The Dodgers look poised to take over the Yankees spot as the most dominant organization in the sport.

Meanwhile in the Bronx….things are just getting worse and worse and worse.  A-fraud is the biggest joke in sports (literally), Jeter is on his last legs, Rivera is retiring after this season, they have nobody in the minors who is close to Major League ready, and the Steinbrenner boys simply aren’t their dad.  It could be a long time before the Yanks are the Yanks that we’ve known for almost 20 years.  There was a time that this was the case before.  After the 81 World Series ironically enough, the Yankees were pretty much irrelevant until 1994.

The Yankees haven’t just won since that time, they’ve got all the headlines even if they hadn’t been winning.  They’ve had the owner, the stars, and the rings.  Now its the Dodgers who have the owner (Magic Johnson), the stars (Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Clayton Kershaw), and now they’re a team that looks poised to begin their ring collection.  They just had their 10 game winning streak snapped Sunday, also had rattled off 15 of 16 prior to that.  Who did they lose to prior to 15 of 16?  You guessed it, the NY Yankees.

It hasn’t been so amazing this season for LA.  They were basically right there with the Blue Jays, Angels and Nationals as the biggest disappointments in the Majors.  Don Mattingly was about to be fired.  But since Puig was called up it has simply been a completely different team.  Now, with their lineup of athletic mashers, and the power arms they have in the staff led by Clayton Kershaw, it would be tough to imagine them not at least coming out of the NL….although as we seen last year the Cardinals are NEVER an easy out, and the Reds are a team that posses the same strengths the Dodgers do and won’t be an easy out.

But even if they don’t get the job done this year, this organization is loaded with all the resources to run everyone’s show for a very long time, just like the Yankees did.  When the Yanks first got back to winning titles in 1996, they were the toast of baseball.  By 2002 they had become the evil empire.  I would suspect that is the same track the Dodgers are on.  But that’s cool with me.  You need historic teams like the Dodgers to be good in all sports.  Hockey is better when the original 6 teams are among the elite.  The NFL is better when the Cowboys, Packers, Steelers and Raiders are elite.  The NBA needs the Lakers and Celtics at the top.  And MLB needs the Dodgers, Yankees and Red Sox to be among the best in the sport.  Weather you love or hate these teams, everything is simply better when they’re in it.

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