They must lose! But exactly how they get cooked also matters.
If you were to poll most Red Sox fans about their preference of the remaining choices to win the World Series, I assume the vast majority would have some variation of Cleveland and the Mets at one and two, the Dodgers largely in the third slot, a few solar systems of space in-between, and then the Yankees pulling up the rear.
But of course, every fan has the right to fan the way they want, so if you have a different order, to each their own.
Anyway, assuming that we all want the Yankees’ ship to go down in flames, exactly how we want that to happen is an interesting question. This fall marks 15 years of the Yankees not only failing to win the World Series, but also failing to even make the World Series.
First of all, “LOL!”
But secondly, it’s hard not to notice how closely this coincides with George Steinbrenner’s death in the summer of 2010. Over this time, the Yankees still haven’t had a losing season (in fact, they haven’t had one since 1992), but in the last half dozen years or so, they’ve also been largely devoid of blockbuster moments on the national stage (good or bad). As a hater from the outside, their two most important on-field moments of late has been their walk-off loss to the Astros in Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS, and their loss in the glorious win or go home single game Wild Card playoff from 2021 at Fenway.
The point is this: The Yankees are supposed to have big moments — ideally from where I’m sitting, bad big moments, but big moments nonetheless. That seems to be happening less and less the further we get away from the Steinbrenner era, and even as they remain competitive year after year, I wonder if this is a permanent reality. If so, that’s pretty lame!
As a Red Sox fan trapped in the mediocre abyss of the last three years, I need a spark of baseball life, and right now I’m so desperate that I wonder if the quickest fix for that would be the Yankees losing in some absolutely rip your soul out fashion.
My default position here is that I want them to lose the next four straight games in blowouts and go home humiliated with a whimper, but now that we’re this far down this ugly road and they have seemingly the easiest path I’ve ever seen to the World Series, I’m at least intrigued at other options. Seeing them lose either a long series to Cleveland in gut wrenching fashion, or even a World Series to the Mets or Dodgers could be quite fun.
The obvious cons here are that any of these options get the Yankees closer to a title, and in the Mets and Dodgers cases actually break their 15 year pennant drought. But still, losing head-to-head to the Mets would be absolutely tremendous content, and really upset the balance of power within New York. Oh, and losing to the Dodgers would mean that tens of millions of extra people are possibly watching them lose thanks to the Ohtani factor. All very tempting!
At the end of the day, my urge for them to lose each individual game is still too strong to want any of this to happen as my top priority, but each game they get closer to the World Series in the easiest path of all time, I take solace in the fact that a bigger, more painful, more dramatic loss might be on the horizon. Or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.
How about you?