The Columnist Manifesto

As a baseball history buff from New York, I still find it painful to contemplate the moves of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to California. MLB should have blocked the moves of at least one of those teams -- probably the Dodgers, whose identity was much more strongly rooted in Brooklyn than the Giants were in north Manhattan -- and located an expansion club in California.

That's water under the bridge. But I found it intriguing to contemplate that in the 2006 season, the two best records in Major League Baseball were held by the Yankees and Mets. The last time that two New York teams pulled off that feat was 1956, when the Yankees faced the Dodgers in the World Series. After that season, the Dodgers moved to LA.

There would have been some historical neatness to having another subway series on the 50th anniversary of that storied 1956 season -- the Dodgers' last season in Brooklyn, Jackie Robinson's last season in the Majors, and the epic, 7-game World Series that included Don Larson's perfect game for the Yankees, the only post-season perfecto in baseball history.

Historically neat, yeah. But screw it! It is SO SWEET that the Yankees got squashed by the Tigers in the first round of the playoffs. Add to that George Steinbrenner fuming about his team's "sorry" and "unacceptable" performance, his veiled and self-destructive threats to fire his extraordinarily successful and well-liked manager Joe Torre, the failure of the club to win the World Series since buying up Jason Giambi and A-Rod, and the ridiculously-highly-paid A-Rod's own epic failure to perform in the post season -- cream in my coffee!

Way to go, Tigers!