If anyone wants to believe that Yankees “bought” the WS, fine, I give up.  “There’s no salary cap in baseball”, “It’s a bigger than big market”, “They have incredible revenue streams” and so on.
Well, look, and NOW I’ll compare baseball to other sports. The Giants have incredible resouces for a football team and won two years ago.  Pittsburgh has more finite ability and does better.  We have THREE hockey teams, only one of which does a little consistant winning, and they’re in Newark.  The Dolans get $160 of my money every nonth and the Knicks suck. And from my limited basketball indifference indicates, they go after big players.
Then there’s that baseball team across the river who have the management acumen of laid off clowns from Barnum & Bailey.
I do not consider myself an arrogant Yankees fan, my neighborhood Mets fans tease me about every loss while I offer sympathy for their year.
Don’t “small-market” teams WANT to have franchise players and keep them?  Tell your owners about it, not meGeorge and I are in complete agreement about the use of his checkbook.
I’m going to take a nap now.  If the money’s on the table, I know I have a partner.

I’m not in favor of a salary cap for various reasons, but if Len is going to suggest that baseball is better without it because the leagues that have them all have terrible teams in NYC… I think he might be convincing me to support one.

I think what really needs to just be put on the table is that it is an undeniable fact that the Yankees clearly have a distinct advantage in terms of revenue over many (if not all) of the other teams in the game. Does it mean parity doesn’t exist? No. Does it mean parity does exist? No.

Does the Yankees winning a championship, or their 15 years of massive success correlate directly to spending? Um, we don’t know. We don’t have enough information. But com’on - you can’t deny that their finances give them a large advantage over everybody else (or nearly everybody else) even before you consider what percentage of revenues are being spent around the league.

Aarcraft: you rightly noted that “Any added utility of Houston neccesarily puts it ahead.”  Having spent some time in Houston, however, I think there is enough disutility to drop it safely behind DQ.

No more steroid leaks until mid-February? Darn. I was hoping for some during the slow news days around the holiday season.