In the baseball world, or just the sports world in general, when one thinks of greed, winning, and a cutthroat attitude, many fans come to think of the New York Yankees. The Yankees are one of the highest winning franchises in all major sports. This has been for many reasons. Yes, they have had some great talent in the past century but many times they have bought the young and talented players from smaller market clubs who could not afford to keep these players. This has escalated since the 1990's where the Yankees have given out multiple hundred million dollar contracts that the player's former team could not afford. New York has found a way to manipulate the system and take advantage of being placed in one of the largest cities in the United States. With a great financial advantage, the Yankees have essentially been able to "buy" some of their championships.
With all of this comes the hatred. Almost any non-New York resident despises the team because of their great greed and power in baseball. Even if they are losing, the Yankees get the attention. This is a prime example of money creating a monster and the monster continues to thrive off of this money. As a lifelong Minnesota Twins fan it has been extremely frustrating to always hear about our homegrown players to be rumored to being a future Yankee. The Twins have lost to the Yankees multiple times in the playoffs with only a quarter of their payroll. New York has sported many players linked to steroids, even fueling the hate more.
The Yankees are a perfect example of creating a monster. Except it was nobody else trying to create one, this team/monster was self created. Buying their way out of things and forcing the less wealthy teams to basically bow down to them has created nationwide hatred for them, and they seem to feed off of that. This may not be a typical monster in a fiction sense, but these Yankees are a the prototypical monster in today's media and sport's world.
First of all I would like to say when I first read the prompt I immediately thought to write about different movies, books, and real life people. I didn't think about sports teams at all but I think the Yankees are a perfect example. Coming from another life long Twins fan I couldn't agree more with the frustration that you feel when you always here about the Yankees getting some new stud or some all star or end up in the playoffs. All are equally frustrating because as a smaller team we are just struggling to find any success while the Yankees are just bathing in it. Not only does their ridiculous amount of money make them monstrous, I would also make the argument that their name simply goes hand and hand with baseball. If you asked any random person to name off 3 MLB teams, odds are one of them will be the Yankees. This is due to just how massive their franchise is. You always see hats, commercials, random sponsors, all kinds of things in everyday life with the Yankees logo on it. This combined with their success makes them an easy enemy for any struggling team and easily classifies them as monstrous. This idea can also be spread to most sports. There's always that team that just always does well and pisses everyone off (Yankees, Blackhawks, Patriots) all of them can be classified as monstrous in their own leagues for similar reasons.
ReplyDeleteLike the other comment here, I thought it was great that you found an example for this prompt that was outside books or movies. The Yankees are a perfect example of what we are talking about. I would never have thought to say that the Yankees are the monsters of the sporting world but after reading this it makes a lot of sense.I wonder now if we would still look at them as these monsters if they did not use their wealth as a way of buying their way out of things as you have said and were just a really wealthy baseball team. It seems to me as if people would not need the excuse of them actually doing anything in order to give them their monstrous status but rather just think of them that way because of their wealth.
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