Harder to Hate

It wasn't too long ago that the Yankees were by far and away the most hated team not only in Major League Baseball, but in all of American professional sports.  Just a few years back, the Yanks would dominate headlines year round, dismantling the competition on the field during the season and in free agency during the winter.  It wasn't at all uncommon to see the Bronx Bombers' annual spending spree steal the back page of Newsday, my hometown newspaper, from the Rangers, Giants or Knicks.  More recently, though, it seems that the Yankees are spending less and less and, as a result, are becoming harder to hate.

On a slow New York-area sports day, today's Newsday back page features a premature preview of Saturday's Jets versus Giants game at the Meadowlands.  Look deeper into the sports section, however, and you'll find a small article about the Texas Rangers winning the rights to negotiate a contract with Japanese starting pitcher Yu Darvish - for just over $57 million, Texas "wins" the chance to sign the 25 year old former Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighter to what is almost assured to be an inflated and overvalued contract.  Doesn't it seem like, just a few seasons ago, Darvish would have been headed to the Bronx (or at least the Red Sox or Mets), angering small market teams and fans everywhere and solidifying the Yankees' reputation as the Evil Empire of baseball?

Newsday's back page does feature a note about the Darvish article that reads "Hardly Knew Yu: Rangers, not Yanks, win bid on pitcher Darvish," indicating that having any team other than New York sign a high-priced free agent still comes to most of us as a surprise.  But with top stars heading everywhere but the Bronx this offseason - Albert Pujols to Anaheim, Jose Reyes to Miami, etc. - maybe we shouldn't be so shocked about Texas winning the Darvish sweepstakes after all.  Perhaps times have changed and the Yankees are getting smarter (there's almost no way, in my opinion, that any of the Pujols, Reyes or Darvish contracts pan out financially for their new teams) and, as a result, just a little less hateable.

Of course, the Yankees won't be truly respected by small market fans until high-priced signings like Mark Teixeira and C.C. Sabathia have long gone and until confirmed cheater and overpaid diva Alex Rodriguez has retired and opened a chain of tacky Miami-area nighclubs.  But all indications suggest that the post-George Steinbrenner Yankees are moving back towards a period of controlled spending, calculated risks and homegrown talent that we haven't seen since Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada lifted the Yanks back to World Series caliber in the mid-1990s.  While I'll miss aggressively hating the Bombers, it does seem like it was time for an aggressive change of strategy - after all, the Yankees haven't won a World Series in over two years now.