New York arrogance

I was twice reminded of New York arrogance today. At work, I saw that a colleague had a newspaper clipping hanging up of when the Yankees swept a five-game set at Fenway in 2006, essentially knocking the Red Sox out of the playoffs for the only time in a six-year span.

Actually, that's not so arrogant. It's almost sad that that's the only success a Yankees fan can point to in recent memory.

Truly obnoxious is a column penned by Filip Bondy in the New York Daily News. He's trying to put forth the theory that New York's true rival is Philadelphia, not Boston. Um, a city as loathsome as New York can have more than one true enemy. Besides, it has multiple teams in different leagues, so what's so hard to grasp that the Phillies are rivals with the Mets and the Red Sox are rivals with the Yankees?

What really gets me is the stupidity of sports writers. I know we've seen it this week, with the 28 people who didn't vote for Rickey Henderson and somehow convinced themselves that the greatest base stealer and leadoff hitter in history isn't a Hall of Famer. {Plus, anything by Bill Conlin.}

But check out this stroke of brilliance:

Boston? Boston is so yesterday around here, and far too Yankee-centric. The Red Sox were a wild-card team last season, nothing more. They've lost Manny, the poster child for anti-pinstriped imagery.

Besides, the Yanks killed them in the offseason. Brad Penny for one year? That's not even trying.

Um, yes, the Red Sox didn't let their team get old and overrated so that it needed to spend hundreds of millions to rebuild its roster. Oh yeah, the Yankees really got us there. And, as far as the Red Sox being nothing more than a wild card team ... I correctly said all season that the real threat to repeating was the Rays, not the Empire. I expect that trend to continue despite the Yankees offseason "victory."