The Yankees sell winning first, and that doesn't just mean first place. At Yankee Stadium, winning has always meant the World Series. You see it way up there on the outside wall above the players' entrance, in print almost big enough to be seen from the Major Deegan, where they list all 26 seasons in which Yankee teams have won it all.
There is no similar list about how many pennants they have won, or how many division titles in a row, as amazing as the accomplishments in both areas are.
Now the Yankees don't promise their fans a World Series every year. They don't come out and say the money they spend on ballplayers, at a rate of $200 million every year, give or take a few million, guarantees them or their fans another trip to the Series.
They still sell the winning. They still fire coaches like Lee Mazzilli when they don't last long enough in October because, well, why wouldn't you fire the bench coach when you can't beat the Tigers? Somebody's got to be blamed, right?
Even this week, when Mike Mussina wasn't talking about Carl Pavano - whose travails seem like they belong on "American Idol" - he was talking about how Yankees are ultimately judged on how they do in the postseason, not the regular season.
So no Yankee can be surprised, or hurt, or act victimized, when people get mad at them, or say mean things about them, when they can't make it out of the first round of the playoffs for the second year in a row.
The Yankees seem to have a real good plan for getting younger now, and not spending the way they have in the past. They got rid of Randy Johnson as a way of accomplishing both. But do you really think Johnson would be in Phoenix if he had pitched like Whitey Ford in October? Come on. You think money or age will be an issue when Roger Clemens is in play, whatever he's saying now about retiring?
Here is what Joe Torre said this week to the media in Tampa:
"The thing that is a little disappointing, and this is something I guess we created ourselves by having success, is that winning 97 games is disappointing. Everybody is criticized - and I don't mean me, personally, but the team - for not getting where they want you to get. That part is frustrating even though I understand it."
He ought to be less frustrated.
And when Torre talks about the criticism, he IS talking about himself, because he didn't like it that people, starting with the owner of the team, were after him when the Tigers series ended the way it did, with another team of his going down in October when it got hit and stayed down.
The Yankees who are still around - and even ones like Bernie Williams, for whom they have left a light on in the window - got rich because they won. There are a lot of reasons Torre is making more than any baseball manager has ever made, and all of those reasons have been repeated for years, but it starts with the fact that in his first six years managing the team he won four World Series.
He is still getting paid off that. Derek Jeter got paid the second biggest contract in baseball history when all that winning was going on. Bernie got paid, Jorge Posada got paid, so did Mo Rivera, even though he thinks it should have been more and wants to get paid again.
Andy Pettitte got paid bigger than ever to come back, and you better believe a lot of that money was on the table because he won here, and that does mean he won the AL East.
So this idea that the expectations for the Yankees are suddenly unreasonable are at least disingenuous, and silly. As silly as the idea that those last three games against the Tigers were some sort of aberration. As if it was just one first-round loss out of the blue, instead of the third in five years.
Guess what? The media didn't do this to the Yankees. Their fans, the ones who show up four million strong every year at Yankee Stadium, didn't suddenly develop delusions of grandeur. Torre is right about this: They did it to themselves.
You know who talks constantly about how the season is a failure if the Yankees don't win it all? The captain of the team. The owner did it for years. Reggie Jackson talks constantly about the 11 games the Yankees are supposed to win in October. Even A-Rod has become part of the sales force.
It is why they all get to do everything about the treatment they got last October except act surprised. If winning the division is enough, if they want to talk as much about the vagaries of a short series as the Atlanta Braves and Oakland A's always have, all that should be part of the marketing now.
