Friday, July 09, 2010

Yanks take 2 from Mariners

All the fun stuff happens when I'm asleep or at the office.

Woke up this morning to--huh?--Cliff-Lee-to-the-Yankees.

Where, for the moment, he would be the number-four starter, behind CC, Pettitte and Hughes. Yeaqh, yeah, for the moment. So now, deep in the shadows of the LeBron debacle, Lee goes to the Rangers.

What is it about the Rangers that always keeps me from taking them seriously? Is it the ten playoff games they played against the Yankees in the nineties, when they succeeded in winning all but nine of them? The slotting of Best Team Plays West Team to a 9-1 record between '96 and '99 drove Ranger owner Tom Hicks to demand that the Wild Card rule of separating division rivals until the Championship Series be junked. Which, of course, would have meant the Yankees and Orioles, or the Yankees and Red Sox, in a first-round best-of-five matchup with only one weekend game. Uh, no.

There is the notion that these Rangers are the New England Patriots, pre-Brady/Belichek, in reverse. For a quarter-century, from the Red Sox's Impossible Dream season of 1967 until the Tuck Bowl in 2002, the Patriots ran a poor fourth in a city where the Red Sox were the religion, the Bruins the passion, and the Celtics the winners. When Doug Flutie was at Boston College in the early eighties, the Pats ran fifth.

Now the Rangers . . . you may have heard about some other sports teams in Dallas. The Cowboys are King, Earl, Duke. The Mavericks are good for passing the time from February to the start of OTAs. The Rangers get the crumbs. Lee? He beat CC twice last October. He would have to do so again for the Rangers to have a chance against New York.

Oh yeah, the Yankees just won their second game in a row; the pitchers they'll have to settle for just held Ichiro and the gang to 2 runs over 18 innings.

1 comment:

SundevilJoe said...

Yes,the Rangers are that team that you never take seriously. It's almost like they are doing this so people might forget the terrible financial mess they are in. Like, how can you afford to add Lee to your payroll when you are officially in bankruptcy even with Seattle paying some of Lee's salary.