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The Curse of the Giambino broken
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Jason Giambi from his rookie season to his years with the Yankees.
The famous Curse of the Bambino that kept the Boston Red Sox from ending their season as baseball's World Series champions took 86 years to be broken. After the last nine years, I began to believe that the Yankees might be cursed too. The playoffs began to trigger something subconsciously, impending heartbreak. And as the seasons moved onward and the drought deepened, it began to become more difficult, physically, to continue watching the team, who seemed to have become a fancy high priced toy.
But this season, things changed. A solid team from top to bottom. A team that played the game right. Fundamentally solid. And as the proof is in the pudding, they were rewarded justly with their 27th World Series championship and another trip down the Canyon of Heroes.
But what had changed so drastically over the past season, something so different from the past nine seasons? Maybe their old house had run out of luck? Probably not. Maybe they just could not win under a Republican president (check out the statistics and who was president each time the Yankees won a championship, nearly 75% of time, 20 of their 27 championships were won with a Democrat in the White House).
Some have said the Alex Rodriguez was the cursed player who not only broke the curse for the Red Sox but kept the Yankees from World Series glory. But such theories have clearly been silenced and proven wrong.
Only a few players fit the time frame, joined the Yankees after 2000 and left in 2008, most notably Mike Mussina and Jason Giambi. Jason Giambi, nicknamed "the Giambino" by announcer John Sterling, seemed to personify everything wrong with the Yankees of recent years. Besides being an absolute liability on defense, made ever the more apparent this season with the stellar defense of Mark Teixeira, Giambi was a big bang player, seemingly incapable of doing the little things to help the team win. With the crowning jewel being his discovered steroid usage, the shame of baseball over the past decade or so.
This is not a scathing indictment of Jason Giambi, meant to shatter his name or his personal identity, as I am sure that Mr. Giambi is a decent human being. But the changes in the team seem stark and I am glad to have moved passed the Curse of the Giambino.
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