Yank this

Contract Steinbrenner's club and all of baseball will benefit

If you've followed anything at all about baseball's plans for contraction, you know that the basic idea to is to wipe out a couple of low-revenue clubs. It's a nasty approach, really, one that amounts to little more than kicking a franchise while it's down. Instead, I have a better solution, one that would at once endear baseball to the Everyfan and save the sport: Contract the Yankees.

Bear with me here.

Deleting the Yankees would have an excellent ripple effect. Disperse the team's $135 million collection of talent in a bottom-up draft and baseball's downtrodden could rise from the ashes overnight. Three needy teams would get aces (Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Andy Pettitte), four others would get perennial All-Stars (Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams), closer Mariano Rivera could improve a team by a dozen victories, and another struggling franchise could build a future around preternaturally talented infielder Alfonso Soriano.

Last week I called Major League Baseball's main office. "Are you considering contracting the Yankees?" I asked public relations boss Pat Courtney.

"Not that I've heard," said Courtney. "They generate too much revenue."

That's exactly the problem. Dismantling the habitually contending Yankees would help correct the sport's revenue imbalance. New York makes too much and spends too much. The Yankees' way was OK in the '90s when rich was cool, but it has no place in today's leaner economy. Their payroll is a good $25 million more than any other team's. Get rid of the Yanks and the crosstown Mets could spend less. So could the Red Sox. So could the Mariners.

There are other benefits to yanking the Yanks. The tiresome YES network-Cablevision war would end. A nickname that fell out of vogue a few years after the Civil War would be disposed of (not to mention a moniker, the Bronx Bombers, that has no place in these uncertain times). Tyrannical King George would be dethroned, yielding one of two desirable results: Either Mr. Steinbrenner would disappear from baseball altogether, or he'd resurface in his second home in Tampa Bay, buy the Devil Rays from Vince Naimoli and brighten the Florida beaches by pumping some of his shipyard millions into the sport's most moribund franchise.

Maybe the best result of this modest plan would be that manager Joe Torre would be off the national stage, thus sparing the public from the sight of him tearing up each time he wins (or almost wins) the World Series. This much, at least, is certain: If the Yankees were contracted, there would be no crying in baseball.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides every Wednesday at CNNSI.com.

 

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