A powerful New York Yankees powerful star player who was declared not for sale has finally been sold for unresisting currency worth billions of…
It turns out that there aren’t as many rewards as you might imagine when you play for the most valued team in baseball. It appears that purchasing your own wifi on team flights is a requirement of signing with the New York Yankees. Is this just another instance of the Yankees being stuck in the past, or is this just cheapness on the part of the team ownership?
Let’s start with Stephanie Apstein’s shocking (well, somewhat shocking) revelation for Sports Illustrated, which stated that players must pay for email access when traveling with the Yankees on a Delta team plane. According to Apstein’s research, the Cincinnati Reds are the only other MLB team that does not offer free internet to its players. This indicates that the Yankees are, in this particular case, more affordable than the Miami Marlins.
Rich athletes can afford the $9 cost (some of them could even purchase the plane); therefore, we’re not here to paint a sob story about them. It’s not as though they don’t have other entertainment options for these lengthy flights. Pitcher Jameson Taillon, who spent two years with the Yankees, is quoted in Apstein’s narrative as saying that “the Yankees fly on a pretty cool custom plane with poker tables and stuff.” “To be honest, I would prefer that to free wifi.”
It makes cosmic sense that the Yankees would provide their players with poker tables but not an internet connection. They continue to live in the past, when playing card games was a more enjoyable way to kill time than playing video games. To be fair, though, why wouldn’t they? The Yankees’ 27 World Series victories cemented their standing as the best team in Major League Baseball. In a sport that appreciates tradition—or at least did until commissioner Rob Manfred came along—that’s a past worth honoring.
But things haven’t been that good lately. Since 2000, the Yankees have only had one championship. That occurred in 2009, the year before George Steinbrenner, the team’s owner, whose influence continues to be felt across the organization, passed away.
In their own unique ways, the Yankees still pay tribute to Steinbrenner’s legacy. Most notably, they still have a very rigid appearance guideline that prohibits players from wearing beards or long hair. The 1976-enacted policy became so widely ridiculed in sports that The Simpsons made fun of it as being out of date. 1992.
While some Yankees fans, especially the older and more conservative ones, supported this stance, it was never actually the main reason they affectionately referred to the very prickly Steinbrenner as The Boss. They enjoyed that their volatile owner was willing to part with his cash and go to any lengths to acquire the players he believed would help them win titles, even if he didn’t always get the right ones. The supporters tolerated his other idiosyncrasies as long as the team was winning, but they complained when they weren’t.
It’s not that the Yankees of today are inherently cheap. Although it may hurt a little that the New York Mets happen to be the team at the top of the list, meaning the Yankees are being outspent in their own city, their $267 million payroll is second in the MLB. The Yankees are by far the most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball, valued at $6 billion, according to a recent Forbes study, which makes this less acceptable.
Put another way, this is a company that can afford to pay a small fee to give its most valuable workers wifi. Heck, many McDonald’s restaurants extend that courtesy to their patrons.
The Yankees are currently just one of those clubs that continues to thrive off of their prior successes. With 17 championship banners and an abundance of retired numbers, the Boston Celtics could be compared to the Yankees of the NBA, but don’t say that to anyone from New England. They have only won one championship in the twenty-first century, which came in 2008.
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Although they continue to promote themselves as America’s team, the Dallas Cowboys haven’t won the Super Bowl since 1995. Rather than winning in the postseason, the present iteration is more remembered for its ugly playoff exits.
The Yankees, like these clubs, are trapped trying to live up to a past that they most likely will never entirely be able to forget. Part of the reason why fans complain that “that’s not how George would have done things” whenever a rival team outbids them for a top free player is because they believe the Yankees are being undervalued, which makes sense given their value as a team.
But mostly, it’s due of the Yankees’ current state of affairs not measuring up to their past glory and an implicit understanding that things will never be the same as they were under The Boss. It’s a different period; both the world and the game have evolved.
Thus, the 2023 Yankees are stuck with a grooming policy that was established back when Elvis Presley was alive, and their players enjoy the anachronistic luxury of playing poker on planes but not online. It almost seems as though they think they can go back in time and recreate the Gatsby way of things in the hopes of perhaps reaching their former glory. Perhaps what’s preventing them from moving forward is their foot in the past.
