I do not pretend to care about the professional baseball. In fact, my brief time working in a newspaper environment on the inside showed me that baseball is the fat sports editor's dream sport, full of numbers and lots of statistical nonsense to peruse over in agate form for hours upon hours and make you forget the stain on your short-sleeved button-down shirt from your tuna salad made with tuna fish in vegetable oil instead of in water like every normal person on earth. I think most people have the sense enough to not really care about baseball, but yet they spend more and more money every year on players, and fucking A-Rod is getting like $350 million to play ball. Shit, if I won the Megamillions three times over, I probably would still be more broke than A-Rod. That's wacky as fuck. I'm not one to be all full of vitriolic faggotry and go, "Why don't schoolteachers make that type of money? What is wrong with us? Visualize whirled peas!" and shit, but seriously, that's ridiculous. And what's even more ridiculous is that a dude could make that much money for playing stupid baseball and he hasn't started an army yet. A-Rod could be king of south Florida by now if he invested his money more militantly.
Anyways, I am a dork myself, and don't watch hardly any of the TV too much anymore, so I have been known to get some stupid shit in my head and look up gay-assed statistics for like two hours in a row, for no reason whatsoever. It's why I started these sporting 14 lists. I am not proud, but I also do not really care. Staring blankly at notepads full of faceless numbers pleases me. When I was a kid and collected baseball and football cards, I'd put all them motherfuckers in order by statistics, then put them all in order by a different statistic, and so on. I'm sure there's psychotropical drugs to curb this type of behavior, but what the fuck? That would only leave me watching TV with a numb feeling. I'd rather just be a time-wasting dork.
What I did for this time, since the baseballs are all in the news, was go back through the time machine (meaning google) and find yearly team payrolls going back to the year 2000, and then divide those payrolls by how many games the teams won in the regular season and playoffs, to come up with a list of the twenty-one teams who had the highest payroll per victory since the year 2000. And the shit boggles my mind. I mean, it's some shit that'll have to bottom out at some point, or at least contract to like half the teams or some shit. But whatever. Here are your twenty-one worst teams of the past 8 seasons when it comes to how much they had to pay for each of their victories. I also have done one for the best 14 teams that I'll drop on you later this week sometime.
#1: 2005 New York Yankees ($2,147,492.96 per victory) - They won the AL East, but lost in the ALDS to the Angels. This was the giant, ridiculous team that had A-Rod start to really earn his absent-in-October reputation, and Randy Johnson collecting a ton of money to pitch in a pretty useless manner, not to mention Kevin Brown getting almost as much to pitch even worse. Also, big-face Bernie Williams got run off at the end of the season, which is funny to me because Bernie Williams looked like he had elephantiasis so I imagined he took that tonic that Mr. Burns gave Ken Griffey Jr. in that one episode of The Simpsons.
#2: 2007 New York Yankees ($1,995,200.47 per victory) - This was just this past year, where the Yankees did get a wild card berth but then dispatched by the Indians and their mysterious demon army of insects. Torre has left and A-Rod has lost his mind, and I guess George Steinbrenner's son is the head crazy fucker now. Hahaha, stupid Yankees. Even growth hormones couldn’t help them. I’m hoping Junior Steinbrenner’s newfound head honcho role is just temporary so that ol’ George can work himself up into an even more insane stupor over all things Yankee.
#3: 2006 New York Yankees ($1,986,357.95 per victory) - Won the AL East, but got shocked in the ALDS by those pesky Detroit Tigers, losing the rights to Gary Sheffield and his drug-addled rants in the process. Another great collection of high-priced all-stars that got nowhere significant, with a freshly shorn Johnny Damon leading the way.
#4: 2003 New York Mets ($1,775,400.44 per victory) - Not to be outdown by their cross-town rival, the '03 Mets assembled together Mo Vaughn and Mike Piazza and Tom Glavine and Robbie Alomar at exorbitant prices to finish last in the NL East.
#5: 2004 New York Yankees ($1,721,438.79 per victory) - Won the AL East, and this is the Yankees team that infamously went up on the Red Sox 3-0 in the ALCS, only to drop the next four to Boston's ragtag assortment of weedheads, oddballs, and midget mascots. Probably the beginning of the end for the Yankees at-any-cost mentality, although I think it's taken until now for that to sink in. And then again, they'll probably pay $30 trillion for seven free agents I never heard of this year as well.
#6: 2007 Chicago White Sox ($1,509,331.01 per victory) - Didn't even make the playoffs, and the interesting thing in looking at all this shit, the White Sox were always pretty low in payroll, then after they won that World Series in '05, they re-upped everybody they felt obligated to, and ever since have come in fairly high on this shitty list, and without another playoff appearance.
#7: 2002 Texas Rangers ($1,468,418.36 per victory) - Hey look, A-Rod's on this team, too. He, along with Pudge Rodriguez, and Rafael Palmeiro formed a Hispanic all-stars batting line-up, and joined Texas ace pitcher Kenny Rogers to finish last in the AL West. To be fair, A-Rod did not play badly in the playoffs during his time in Texas.
#8: 2003 Texas Rangers ($1,457,629.11 per victory) - Basically you can just see the above blurb, except Pudge and Rogers were gone because the Rangers couldn't afford them and A-Rod. They still finished last in the AL West though.
#9: 2006 Chicago Cubs ($1,430,674.23 per victory) - Giant payroll, underachievers trying to make up for the curse of Bartman, but finishing last in the NL Central, costing baseball's Malcolm X - Dusty Baker - his tutorial position, allowing Lou Piniella to get another job where he can say wacky old drunk dude things.
#10: 2006 Boston Red Sox ($1,396,509.58 per victory) - The lackluster season that sits in between their two World Championships of this lifetime. I can't remember if they made the playoffs or not, and I'm not in cyber mode (working in the camper, which is wrapped in aluminum siding to keep modern brain-cancering technology to a minimum), but it doesn't matter. They won it in '05 and in '07, and Red Sox fans are drunken fools, so I'm sure they were wicked pissed in '06.
#11: 2003 New York Yankees ($1,388,634.67 per victory) - It's the last time they actually made the World Series, and they got waxed by an upstart Florida Marlins team lead by young Josh Beckett. The closest Steinbrenner fantasy line-up baseball has come to a ring in recent history, which makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I hate Yankees fans, mostly because it's so easy, and still they get indignant about shit when you mock the Yankees. It's like being a Christian and acting like you're the oppressed one so you hang a blank grey flag for countries that allegedly execute Christians as if that shit was happening all the time.
#12: 2004 Arizona Diamondbacks ($1,368,250.00 per victory) - This was the first year after they broke up the mega-pitcher tandem of Johnson/Schilling, and was just left with a half-crippled Randy Johnson, who underperformed like a motherfucker with his big ostrich-looking ass, and all those bonus contracts they'd given out after the World Series win a few years earlier had come back to roost as a shitty team that finished way out of the playoff hunt.
#13: 2004 New York Mets ($1,361,422.11 per victory) - Mike Piazza and Tom Glavine, together forever, and the Mets, as usual, sucked. Also, the start of the ascension of the superstardom baseball fuckery of David Wright.
#14: 2007 Baltimore Orioles ($1,355,866.78 per victory) - Haha, the Orioles have sucked ever since Ripken gave up the game, and stand little chance of getting better. Being a man who reads the Washington Post paper pretty much daily, and knowing the whole story of the Nationals getting back to Washington, it comes as no shock that the Orioles would suck, with Peter Angelos as their owner. That guy is a first class piece of shit, and really the only thing that makes me feel better about being a die-hard Washington Redskins fan with Daniel Snyder as owner is thinking to myself, "Well, at least he's not Peter Angelos." Although, I guess I'd prefer he was closer to Angelo's age.
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