How could a group of people so obsessed with objective observations and statistics allow their personal biases to cloud their judgment? On the last day of the regular season, home field advantage in the Yankees v. Angels series was still up for grabs. The Yankees needed either a win or an Angel loss to clinch it. Now, the Yankees had to worry about getting their players ready for Tuesday's playoff game, so they decided to start Wright and save Moose. {whether Moose should be starting game one is a different issue}. But, they played the vast majority of starters in the field and only started pulling them once the game was out of reach and Cleveland had lost (thus meaning that the bosox were going to win the wildcard).

[note: i realize this is a lot of setup considering almost everyone who reads this blog follows the yankees, but just in case...]

Now, in the angels game, they were playing the Rangers, who have nothing to play for. The rangers manager, Buck Showalter, was fired from the Yankees in 1995 and apparently still holds a grudge. He sat his best player (Soriano) and then pulled his other good players in the third inning. After the game, he claimed that soriano asked for the day off, and that he pulled the players so that they could get cheered by the fans. This is possible, but I don't buy it.

Regardless, Torre was asked to comment about it and said he didn't think it was right. The vast majority of primates started posting that the Yankees were whining, and thought that the world revolved around them. It was borderline insane.

If this happened to ANY other team, the responses were different. But because it was the MFYankees, they aren't allowed to complain. "come on, they have a 200 million dollar payroll...who are they to complain about fairness?". I was ashamed at such arguments. "if torre wanted to win so badly, he shouldn't have pitched wright!". "if the yankees wanted home field, they should have won on sunday, or any other game".

These arguments are completely illogical and biased. Why should the yankees have to clinch homefield advantage in 161 games when all other teams have 162? I hate, with a burning passion, when people use the "well, if they REALLY wanted something, they should just go above and beyond the adversity". This is the naivity that plagues republicans (just work hard, and you'll achieve the american dream.) Hey, who cares if your boss is sexist, just work harder to prove him wrong.

Why should they have to? Why are inequities and unfairness allowed to exist with the only justification being "well, it wasn't 100% dispositive, in theory it can be overcome". What Showalter did was bad for the game of baseball. There is a goodfaith effort to play the game to win. Yes, in a meaningless game between two teams out of the race, it's ok to just go through the motions (though that's not really fair to the ticket buyers). But this game had an impact on the playoffs. It shouldn't be determined by one team laying down....especially if it was done out of spite.

I didn't really care about the issue at first (though i thought it was wrong). but, after witnessing how biased the primates were, it got me more upset. If this happened to ANY other team, there would be outrage. Heck, I was pretty upset when the whitesox were laying down for the indians, even though doing so hurt the redsox.