With the end of the baseball season looming, this piece by Chicago Sun-Times reporter Chris De Luca really gets my goat. I’ll just say it: there is no mystique behind the New York Yankees: they are rich; they live out of their oh-so-deep pockets; they don’t build baseball teams — they buy them.

If a team like the Chicago White Sox (or the other Sox, even), want to be intimidated by that, that is their dumb choice. De Luca, though, and most other sportswriters are enthralled with the Yankees and their so-called “mystique”. It’s an obsession that they don’t seem capable of shaking off.

Even in this write-up, Lou Piniella says:

There really isn’t any [mystique] … The media creates mystique because they talk about it all the time.

Coming from a man who used to play and even manage the Yankees, it’s hard to find a more solid source for debunking the mystique myth. Yet De Luca plainly does not care about what Piniella thinks, going on to write, “Real or imagined, the Yankee mystique is hard to ignore.” Argh!!! If it’s imagined, then at least give the sheer intimidation factor of Yankee’s wealth another name, please!

The word “mystique” is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

An aura of heightened value, interest, or meaning surrounding something, arising from attitudes and beliefs that impute special power or mystery to it

Yes, the Yankees have more monetary value than other Major League teams, but it there is no “special power” or “mystery” involved.

Perhaps this silly tendency to attribute mystery-outside-of-money to the team that has won more World Series championships than any other team stems from the supposed mysterious, mystical nature of baseball. Perhaps. Baseball may “90% mental”, but that’s no excuse for losing because you can’t deal with being intimided by your own obsession with one opponent’s fat payroll and with that payroll’s rewards.