What do Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Jeter have in common?
As of Wednesday morning, neither played shortstop for the top team in the American League East this season. That honor belonged to Baltimore Oriole Miguel Tejada, whose team to that point led both Garciaparra's Boston Red Sox and Jeter's New York Yankees in the early stages of the division race.
But watching SportsCenter, or YES or NESN, or talking to baseball fans among the Northeast-centric AU student body, you wouldn't know it. All the talk is of the Red Sox' 3-1 series victory over the Yankees this past weekend.
And why not? One of these two teams is going to take the division title in the end, and they're both going to be in the American League Championship Series. FOX already penciled the series in, somewhere between Temptation Peninsula and American Idle - an AIM reality show - as the centerpiece of its fall lineup.
The Yankees might have penciled it in as well. On Wednesday morning, they sat at 7-7, a pedestrian start for the most prestigious club in Major League history. The Red Sox are better at 8-5, just a half-game behind the surprising Orioles at 8-4. And were Garciaparra in the lineup, and not on the disabled list, they likely would lead the division.
But the Red Sox don't. The Yankees don't. It's eerily similar to last year's World Series.
Remember who won the World Series last year? Herds of Yankee fans think they won it - wrong. Schools of Red Sox fans think they lost it - wrong, ironically.
The half-dozen Florida Marlins fans out there remember what really happened, in Yankee Stadium, in Game 6, when the Marlins' beat the narcoleptic Yankees and became World Champions.
It hardly made the papers. Aside from Marlins manager Jack McKeon winning his first World Series at age 70-something, the big stories were "Whose Yankee scalp will belong to owner George Steinbrenner?" and "What's the over/under on the date of Red Sox manager Grady Little's pink slip?"
In the off-season, the Yankees got Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez, the Red Sox got Curt Schilling, and both team's payrolls continued to balloon. The Marlins unloaded Ivan Rodriguez, Derrek Lee and Ugueth Urbina, and talk of the 2004 ALCS began.
But of the three, only the Marlins topped their division Wednesday morning - the slightly less north - east centric National League East, where the Marlins are two games ahead of the Atlanta Braves. Meanwhile the Orioles, who have more big names now (Tejada, Javy Lopez, Rafael Palmeiro) than the Marlins did last year (Rodriguez), are dominating their opponents - though they've been mainly hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Toronto Blue Jays.
If the small-market Marlins could hold their own against the bigger-market Atlanta Braves and New York Mets in the regular season, and then against the San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Yankees on their championship run, the Orioles - a bigger market team that can make a big trade in July if it's still in the hunt - surely can hold theirs.
But don't tell that to Yankees fans, and don't tell that to Red Sox fans. As much as they hate each other, they'll quickly agree they're both a class above anyone else - in the Yankees' case, two classes. More importantly, don't tell that to FOX, who would probably preempt their playoff telecasts to show the 16th season premiere of The Simpsons - get this - in October!
I'm not saying the Orioles are going to win the AL East. As a fair- weather O's fan, I've watched owner Peter Angelos destruct a good ball club for the sake of good profits before. And 12 games do not make a season. But with the Yankees and Red Sox obsessing over each other like two teenage ex-lovers, they seem to have forgotten about 28 other MLB clubs.
If you want to name a problem in Major League Baseball, that's it. It's not a league, like the NFL. It's big-name teams and star players are making the headlines.
For a sport that goes by the moniker "America's pastime," its price before performance attitude is a troubling, yet perhaps truthful reflection on the land it claims to represent.
