by Phantom Hitckhiker

Created on: August 13, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

No. Baseball salaries provide the basis for a shot at the championship, but not even that is a necessary basis for achievement of one; without successful chemistry between players, and appropriate strategies by general managers in the actual games themselves, baseball teams rarely win championships by sheer strength of roster. Consider the following.

In the years of New York Yankee dominance of major league baseball at the end of the 20th century, many people rightfully claimed that manager Joe Torre was good at, quite accurately, just what his name implied: managing the Yankees, rather than leading them. For leaders, one could look to the best pitchers, the best hitters, the best...players, in other words. But Torre himself? He kept the system running like a well-oiled machine, so long as Steinbrenner kept shelling out the money for the domination to continue...or so went the conventional wisdom.

Around rolled 2001, and the coming of the challenge of the Arizona Diamondbacks. True, they had a high-paid roster as well, enough so that Stewart O'Nan claimed (in he and Stephen King's several-years-later volume on the 2004 Red Sox season) it was bought just as much as the Yankees' victories had been...but in the end, the higher paid was, without doubt, New York. Through seven games they battled...and in the end, the Yankees finally lost; Phoenix claimed its first world championship in any major American sport, and many anti-Yankees fans around the nation rejoiced.

Steinbrenner paid just as much the following year...but again, the Yankees failed; and this time, early in the playoffs, rather than late: they were defeated by the eventual world champion Anaheim (later Los Angeles) Angels. Once more, the casual fan can cry foul, that Los Angeles would be no slouch in the monetary spending category; and such is certainly true, in the sense of large bucks being forked over for powerful teams. As stated at the beginning, strong financial for players provide much incentive for them to play; this, an obvious matter.

But in the end, they do not BUY championships. The games must be won, on merit of performance. And in this performance, the West Coast was easily the superior: Los Angeles faced San Francisco, for the World Series, despite the amount of cash Steinbrenner spent.

Next year, next run at the proverbial slot machine. This time, the ever-spending Yankees got further, back to where they were in 2001 (after a life-draining experience for Boston Red Sox fans in the 2003 American

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