Oh look a baseball troll

The Yankees are currently on an interleague jaunt to the West Coast, during which the games get started right about the same time I’m brushing my teeth before bed, so I haven’t even been able to follow along with semi-real-time internet coverage. I have instead been relying on the after-the-fact internet coverage on the Yankees website on the mornings after. Today I was happy to note that the Yankees had won a close one last night, 6-5, which gave them a series win over the Diamondbacks and also increased their first place lead, as both the Rays and Sox lost. I clicked over to the game wrap-up summary article because based on the score alone (significant runs on both sides in a tight contest) I figured I might have missed a good one, plus I was curious to see whether or not A-Rod had gotten one stroke closer to 600 HRs. (He had not.)

And it turned out I did in fact miss a good one that went into extra innings and was saved by Rivera after he put himself in a bases loaded, nobody out jam. There’s no way I could have possibly stayed up until the last frame, even if it had been televised, but I was happy for the write-up. One of these days, though, I am going to learnt o stop reading when the article ends, and not continue on to the comments. Because teh interwebs are full of trollish douchebags.

Case in point was a hater who had felt compelled to append a caustic missive to the game wrap, pointing out that the Yankees did not “deserve” to win the game, because they had so many earlier opportunities to score and “couldn’t get the job done”, all of which proved (to the troll) that the entire starting lineup for New York was overpaid relative to their lack of hit-producing ability.

Unfortunately I have been mentally gnawing on that comment all morning and now you all are going to have to deal with me getting my reaction out of my system, because I refuse to be drawn in to the message board shenanigans. Now, as I’ve already admitted, I did not see the game in question. However, I know with absolute certainty that the troll is completely wrong and has a shaky grasp on logic at best.

One of the things I love about sports is that the team that wins is almost always the team that deserves to win. There are occasionally exceptions of exceeding rarity, such as questionable officiating (or, ahem, fan interference) but by and large the games have clear and enforceable rules, two teams go at it under those rules, and in the end there’s no ambiguity about the winner. (I am, for what it’s worth, also a firm believer in the proposition that anything in which winning is subject to interpretation, such as the scores awarded by judges in figure skating, may be an athletic endeavor but is not technically a sport.) The team that deserves to win any given baseball game is the team that scores the higher number of runs by the end of nine (or more) complete innings. By utterly no coincidence, that is in fact by rule the way they award wins in the MLB. The Yankees scored 6 runs to the D-Backs 5 and, regardless of how many more runs they could have scored in various parallel universes where butterfly wings flapped to a different rhythm, they deservedly won the game.

And, to the best of my understanding, the job of every professional ball player is to win games. I guess in the moneyball era of contract incentive clauses and free agency and all an argument could be made that certain role players have more granular job duties, that some guys are getting paid to hit 30 home runs a season, or bat over .290, or steal bases, or make the All-Star Team, or whatever. But a lot of that becomes untenable when you shift from the player level to the team level. It’s not the Yankees’ collective job to score the most runs in the AL (though we all know it certainly makes Papa Steinbrenner happy when they do); it’s their job to win games, and ultimately championships. If you want to say a DH who went 0-for-4 and thus extended a seven-game hitless streak isn’t getting his job done in a specific at-bat, I’m not going to argue that point at all. But if you want to convince me that a whole team isn’t getting the job done, your best chance is to point to a game they actually lost, you know?

(Also, this is completely and borderline-unforgivably irrational, but anytime someone talks about “getting the job done” it makes me think reflexively of “git-r-done” which makes me think of Larry the Cable Guy, whom I loathe with the burning passion of a thousand exploding suns, so much so that his mere presence as the voice of Tow Mater is sufficient cause that whenever my wife points out to me that we also haven’t seen Pixar’s Cars, I pretend I can’t hear her.)

And the whole overpaid thing just unfailingly rankles me. Yeah, New York has the highest payroll, how shameful, because money is bad! Go back to Stalingrad, commie!

Well, that feels better. Now having once again burnished my bona fides as a despicably over-entitled New York Yankees fan, I guess I can call it a day.