by David Beck
Whoa,
there! I thought the Giants were supposed to win the World Series this year!
After all, they had the best record in the major leagues. Well, lads, record
means diddly these days, and Our Boys got whupped by the more highly paid Mets.
Justice is done, much to the bewildered chagrin of all those who actually thought
this competition was on the up-and-up.
Yes, justice is done because in today's major league world, the team that is supposed to win is the more highly paid one. Whether or not you accept your lumps -- indeed whether or not you acknowledge that 600-ton weight called free agency that lies on top of you and smushes every granule in your Giants-baseball-lovin' body -- that the Giants had the best record in the majors meant squat going into the Division Series.
What did mean something is that the Mets were better paid.
For that matter, that the Yankees were better paid than the Mets meant that the Yankees were pretty much guaranteed to win the World Series again.
This is not the idea that one team just happens to have higher-paid players. It is the idea that one team is favored because they can get higher-paid players, and because those teams are the ones that Joe Powers-That-Be wants to win. More people pay more money for Yankees success than Expos success, so everything is done to make the Yankees success much more likely -- so much so that it destroys the integrity of the game. It is WWF Baseball now.
I am so sick of all this crap I want to hurl my lungs, and for the past two years I haven't even been following any of it! Yeah, I so want to light into Joe Fan it isn't funny. To wit:
That a billion gijillion people still gave their $$$ and attention to this crap after it occurred. What Clemens did was shameful, how the majors handled it was just as shameful, but the most shameful thing is that Joe Fan thought nothing about enabling it the very next game by walking through the turnstile at the stadium or flipping on the television set.
But let's talk Giants, for the real issue is that if Joe Fan had any convictions or principles, he'd be a Giants fan. We can all agree on that. Still, with heart full of sorrow, I must confront the vicious beast that has assailed Our Boys, and its name is Free Agency.
I would love to shout to the world, "I told you so." But I won't because one of two things always happen after someone says "I told you so," and both make the "I-told-you-so-er" look really bad.
First, if the results from what the I-told-you-so-er said is something horribly wretched, like, "I knew it! You spilled that cup of coffee into the computer nuclear weapon launch system! I told you there would be a nuclear holocaust because of your stupidity! Now look!": As you, the coffee-spiller, wonder what you will now do in the middle of a nuclear winter wasteland soaking up the lethal radiation, you will certainly not feel any better knowing that you could have done something to avoid it, much less that the I-told-you-so-er is reminding you about it.
Secondly, if the results from what the I-told-you-so-er said would happen are actually not that bad after all, the I-told-you-so-er is then seen as a gloom-and-doomer chicken little who is only out to make people feel bad when there is no reason to feel bad to begin with.
In either case, everyone sees the I-told-you-so-er as a really big dink. It is of no matter that he is really working hard to get people to see the "errors of their ways" (ee-yew, don't you hate people who speak of the "errors of your ways" -- what arrogance!) No matter how blatantly obvious those errors are, the one who speaks the hard truths is always derided.
So I won't say I told you so.
I won't remind you what I said way back in July -- that part about the Giants having no chance. I won't mention that despite finishing the season with the best record in the major leagues -- as jazzed as we all were about that -- it is a most distant memory now. The only thing that goes in the books is who wins the whole enchilada. I won't urge you to temper your exuberance about just how golly-gosh well we did, how proud we are all supposed to be about Our Boys. A team of Pollyannas never won the World Series.
I certainly don't need to mention that the Giants were supposed to win the World Series, but didn't, and this is of no fault of the team.
Furthermore, I figure I don't have to say that it was Joe Fan and his unbending devotion to the WWF Yankees that cost us the title, because surely you already know this. Surely.
Whatever the case, I can say...
Take heart Joe Quixote. There's still the windmill.