INSTIGATING LOGIC
A national pasttime
By JARED PUTNAM

October has its fair share of traditions. Autumn leaves change colors, festivals pop up left and right, and one night of out of the year parents let their kids load up on all the candy they can carry. Sports fans, particularly baseball fans, also have their October traditions. For me its two-fold. For the past decade and a half, I have spent the first part of the month rooting for the Braves. For some strange reason that wasn't on the calendar this year. But my second obligation remained intact, which is of course, rooting for whoever plays the Yankees.

Maybe this should be a sports editorial, but disliking the

Yankees isn't so much a sports preference as it is a way of life. The Yankees are the team everyone outside of New York loves to hate. They are the Lex Luthor of baseball, the organization that can go buy whoever and whatever it needs, practically foundering itself on talent. This year the Yankees began the season with a payroll of over $194 million. $194 million, and it only climbed as the season went along. That's over $74 million more than the next closest team. By comparison, the lowly Florida Marlins spent less than $15 million this year. Their payroll wouldn't even come close to supporting the salary that the Yankees paid to Alex Rodriguez alone this year. Rodriguez makes a cool $25 million per year.

But luckily, as they have now done for the past six seasons, the Yankees choked in the playoffs, falling to the Detroit Tigers, a team that lost 119 games just three years ago. The thing about the Yankees is that they are not necessarily bad for baseball, just bad for the AL East. The Yankees are essentially a team of all-stars. They buy or trade for so much talent that no other team in that division can hang with them over a 162 game season. But come playoff time, it's a different story.

In the playoffs, pitching wins games more than ever. Part of that reason is simply because in the playoffs teams go from using a 5-man pitching rotation to a 4-man rotation or sometimes even a 3-man rotation. Teams see less of their opponents weakest links. Whereas the Yankees lineup

can knock around the lower end of an opponents rotation in the regular season, they have to face the big guns in a short series.

But its more than just that. The Yankees also suffer the problem of employing a list of glorified choke artists. Remember when the Yankees used to have the likes of Paul O'neil, Tino Martinez, and Scott Brosius? Those guys that would always come through in the clutch. They eventually dumped them for big money players like Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, and Rodriguez.

Giambi has done well just to rebound from his steroid scandal. Sheffield, as Braves fans may remember, loses all ability to hit in the postseason, and trading his tomahawk for pinstripes did nothing to correct that problem. Then there is Rodriguez, the man who will have made a quarter of a BILLION (that's right, billion with a "b") dollars by the time his

10 year contract ends in four more years. He has set a playoff record, one of ineffectiveness. With two outs and runners in scoring position, Rodriguez is 0- 16 in the postseason, a feat no one else has accomplished. He was so inept this postseason that before it was all said and done he had been demoted to batting eighth.

Even though Yankees owner George Steinbrenner threatens to clean house after each of their annual implosions, this year it looks like it may be legitimate. Giambi, Sheffield, and Rodriguez may all be shown the door.

Rodriguez deserves whatever he gets, whether it be staying under the scrutiny of fans in the pressure cooker of New York or being dumped off on another team. He made his bed the minute he conned the Texas Rangers into inking that ridiculous contract. At the time he

seemed content to play for a losing team in order to get that much cash.

But only three years into the deal he managed to whine his way out of the Lone Star state, finding his way to the Yankees, a team where he probably expected to be able to enjoy the spotlight while tagging along for a championship ride each year. Instead he has failed to bring the Yankees a championship while proving that he is not a leader. If there was any doubt before, ARod has validated one old-fashioned philosophy for teams trying to win a championship. That being, never put one player above an entire team.

Maybe the Yankees will eventually realize that a roster overloaded with egos and expectations is doomed to failure. In the meantime, all the Yankee haters will continue to enjoy watching them melt under the pressure each October.