What with all the attention you've been lavishing on that new Marley & Me DVD and the NCAA Women's Final Four, you probably haven't noticed but starting, like, yesterday, Major League Baseball has returned to the national stage. We've got stacked teams in four of the country's biggest baseball markets—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and New York—and plucky underdogs set to excite the imagination of loserhead towns in much the same manner that the out-of-nowhere Tampa Rays did last year. It shall be a veritable cavalcade of whimsy.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start slowly, with your talking points for the first week of the 2009 MLB campaign. Use them judiciously.
"The Yankees are trying to buy a World Series title!"
The Yankees spent a lot of cash this off-season, signing three of the four top available free agents (first baseman Mark Teixeira and starting pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett). In some fans' minds, this makes them cheaterhead bogeymen, kind of like ExxonMobil in cleats. In the real world, they're subsidizing half the league thanks to revenue-sharing agreements and so-called luxury taxes that kick in when a team's payroll passes a certain threshold. As far as monopolies go, they're not exactly U.S. Steel.
"That's just Manny being Manny."This phrase can be used to justify any dopey, aberrant and borderline illegal behavior by Dodger slugger and first-ballot Hall of Famer Manny Ramirez. He asks a fan to re-braid his cornrows between innings? Manny being Manny. He informs the team that he'd like to tele-commute? Manny being Manny. Try using it yourself, especially if you've got a strange officemate ("Somebody's dotting all the I's on our contracts with little hearts? Oh, that's just Eunice being Eunice!").
"They oughta cancel their October tee times."
Your 2009 front-runners are the aforementioned Yankees, the Boston Red Sox (there's nearly as much pitching here as in the entire AL Central), the Tampa Bay Rays (fast and frisky), the Chicago Cubs (the class of the inferior National League) and the New York Mets (they fixed the bullpen, but they didn't fix the corner-outfield slots). Of course, in the last five years, the "best" team based on record and run differential (runs scored minus runs allowed) claimed only two of five World Series Championships. Why? Because…
"Winning is hard, dude."
It requires great luck and good health, plus your opponents screwing up at the worst possible moments. That's why the Philadelphia Phillies won't repeat as champions—well, that and the left-ward tilt of its batting order and the lack of depth in the starting rotation and the stiff, achy left elbow of pitching ace Cole Hamels. Hey, championship banners fly forever, right?
"You know who could possibly maybe kinda sorta win some games this year? The Reds, that's who."
They're the sleeper pick, owing to a healthy foursome of reliable starters and some blossoming talent in the lineup. They might have to go fetch a left fielder before the trade deadline.
"Honestly, are these guys even trying?"
Your likely cellar-dwellers/embarrassments to their families are the San Diego Padres (going for broke, literally and metaphorically), the Baltimore Orioles (tough division, so check back in 2010) and, for the 142nd straight season, the Pittsburgh Pirates (three functional major-leaguers in the everyday lineup). Also feel free to liken the scrub-lovin' Houston Astros to some kind of thoractic parasite and the personality-free Colorado Rockies to an unbuttered, unjellied piece of toast.
"Man, baseball's gotta do something about the steroids."
They really don't—they've put into place the toughest testing policy of all U.S. professional sports leagues. But conventional wisdom is that the clubhouses are populated by gaggles of 'roid-heads and their sketchy needle monkies. Here's a fun parlor activity: If you're hanging with football fans, wonder innocently why there are so many quarterbacks who physically dwarf the mountainous "Hogs" offensive line of the circa-1988 Washington Redskins, and express amazement that NFL players have managed to triple their bulk thanks to "advances in nutritional technology."
"These guys are in for a rude economic awakening."
In baseball as in banking, everybody's got his hand out. Take the Oakland A's, an extraordinarily well-run franchise that may be homeless within three years. Or take poor Bobby Abreu, forced to subsist on a pre-incentives salary of $5 million after earning $16 million in 2008. And then there are the past-their-prime superstars who can't get a job at any salary, including Hall of Fame automatics Pedro Martinez and Frank Thomas. Things are tough all over.
"Poor, sweet Alex Rodriguez can't seem to catch a break."
After a quiet winter of divorce fallout and Madonna-squiring and reporter-baiting and steroid admissions and teary press conferences, he'll spend the first six weeks of the season recuperating in Vail from hip surgery. If you don't feel for this guy, gosh, you're just not human.