Well, it's over...

...and the Yankees have won the World Series. As a Phillies fan, I'm disappointed, but not dissatisfied - they got back to the Series to defend their title from last year, which is difficult enough that they were the first team this decade to do so. But if they had to lose, I would have preferred it not been to the Yankees. They are among the most despicable teams in major American sports. With the exception of A-Rod, who IS a tool, it's not the players I dislike - Derek Jeter has always been a classy professional and several of the Yankees' current regulars seem like decent guys. It's the fans. Like fans of the Lakers, Cowboys, and Maple Leafs, their counterparts in the other professional sports, Yankees view a season without a playoff appearance as a failure and decade without a championship as a travesty. To anyone who's spent a lifetime rooting for perennial losers who fail spectacularly when they do manage to make it to the big stage - say, someone from Cleveland, or before last year, Philadelphia - that sort of sense of entitlement is pretty tough to stomach. This is particularly true in the case of baseball, in which rich teams like the Yankees can buy the best players off of their poorer competitors, in addition to paying to make their mistakes go away with impunity. From a baseball perspective, the Yankees aren't the best run organization in MLB - just the one with the largest margin for error. They're a team for Wall Street hedge fund managers whose firms are "too big to fail" - people insulated from the consequences of their actions. Unless you were born and raised in New York, and have a blood-branded loyalty to them, as my father and much of his family were, they are impossible to root for.

I'm already looking forward to next year. Hopefully, the Phillies can regain their title, though I'd settle for the Yankees losing theirs.