Bob McFlurry With Sports
I just read an article by N.Y. Times writer WILLIAM C. RHODEN on why he thinks a Yankees Vs. Dodgers World Series would be great for baseball. No doubt that would be appealing in the sense of America’s two largest markets and an East/West Coast dynamic to it but Rhoden seems to give odd reasoning why the matchup would be good for baseball.
“what Major League Baseball needs is a great World Series, a Series for the ages. And with all due respect to those two other potential matchups, it’s a Yankees-Dodgers World Series that could take the game back to its roots at a time when baseball desperately needs to recover a portion of the trust, if not the innocence, that it has lost in the steroid era.”
Mr. Rhoden, if you want to recover a “portion of trust” for baseball then why would you match up teams with marquee players that have been anything but truthful in their dealings with performance enhancing drugs. While Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez and Andy Pettie are hardly the only players in the last 20 years to have taken and gotten caught taking performance drugs how do you figure that those guys being in and winning a World Series is going to recover some innocence it lost in the steroid era? How would a Dodgers/Yankees matchup, “reinforces its roots and, yes, its relative purity”?
Trust, innocence, relative purity? What are you smoking Rhoden? I’m not going to argue a Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be good for ratings, but good for the game?
I think the Phillies beating the Yankees would be poetic in a year when A-Rod had to come out of the closet with his use of PED’s. A Phillies Vs. Angels series (while not having one of the big 2 markets involved) could have the makings to be one of the greatest series of all time given the way the teams play and the absence of a tainted marquee player.
Overall, don’t give me your purity, innocence and trust logic while debating on which teams should be in the series because the two teams you suggested, Rhoden, debunk your whole theory. I don’t know how you run your household but when a dog pisses the carpet, you don’t give him a treat.