Stark, your bias bothers me
November 16, 2009, 7:00 pm by iYankees · 2 Comments
From Jayson Stark (ESPN):
So $1.76 billion dollars could buy you 434.5 million Big Macs. Or 110 million large pepperoni pizzas at Domino’s. Or, in the case of the New York Yankees, two parades through the Canyon of Heroes.
We’ve done the hard arithmetic on a Best of the ’00s list you haven’t seen anywhere — Most Dollars Spent in the Aughts (via the USA Today Salary Database and the Biz of Baseball Web site). And here’s what we found:
The Yankees paid out more than $1.76 billion in the ’00s — more than half a billion bucks more than the next-closest team, the Red Sox (who spent $1.21 billion).
The top-spending National League team, the Mets, wrote almost $641 million less in checks than the Yankees did.
With regards to the Yankees, I can’t take anything Stark says seriously.
Prior to joining ESPN, Stark, a native son of Pennsylvania, spent 21 years working for the Philadelphia Inquirer and covered the Phillies. In March, his latest book, “Worth the Wait: Tales of the 2008 Phillies,” was released and, from the title, you can see why I might feel compelled to question Stark’s work when discussing the Yankees and their World Series win on ESPN. To be honest, his allegiances are far too clear, despite his own claims of objectivity. For instance, if you read the article quoted above without knowing that Stark had worked in Philadelphia, I still think, by the end of the piece, you would think to yourself, “This guy has to be a Phillies fan” (Yankees are jeered, Phillies cheered).
Maybe it’s because Stark even plugs his Phillies-centric book at the end. Oh, well…
