Peter Gammons Strikes Again

As I’ve written is the past, Peter Gammons is, in my opinion, the worst baseball writer out there. Here are just a  few of his offenses — he openly shills for the Red Sox. His columns are poorly written. And he is never right. His promo for the MLB Network makes me laugh — “I don’t worry about being first. I worry about being right.” Well, he’s never first, and he’s certainly never right.

Well, here’s another Gammons (left, being inexplicably being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame) gem from a recent column on MLB.com. Incidentally, I didn’t even know he had a column on MLB.com. There was a link to a Mets related story on MLB Trade Rumors, and I clicked on it. I don’t make a habit of reading writers whom I don’t like (cough, cough Phil Mushnick).

Speaking of Mushnick, it amazes me how one man can be on the wrong side of virtually every argument. Sometimes I get sucked into his column by an intriguing headline, and I’m always mad at myself afterwards.

Anyway, back to Gammons. He was writing about baseball looking into ways to make competition fairer. Here’s what he wrote:

One suggestion to slow down the economic impact the Yankees and Red Sox have on small-market teams is to break them up and move one of them into another division. The suggestion is to put the Yankees and Mets in the same division and the Red Sox and Rays in another.

“That way, the Yankees and Red Sox won’t be competing with one another,” says one official, “and reacting to every move the other makes.”

Okay, let’s look at this ridiculous statement from several different angles. First off, no one is named except “one official.” Gee, could that official be from the Red Sox, which would benefit the most from this scheme? Or is there no official at all — just Gammons trying to help out his favorite club?

Now, about splitting up the Yankees and Red Sox to help small market teams. Exactly how does that accomplish that? Unless the Yankees are in a division with four other big market teams, (say, the Mets Dodgers, Angels and Cubs) small market teams will still be in their division competing against them. Such a big market division would be geographically undesireable and logistically impossible. There would have to be a couple of small market eastern teams with the Yankees.

And the comment by that mysterious official, that the Yankees and Red Sox would no longer have to react to every move the other makes. Yeah, so that means the other big market team in the division, in this case the Mets, would have to react to every move the Yankees make to remain competitive. So that just replaces the Red Sox with the Mets as the team spending to keep up with the Yankees.

Finally, Gammons’ alignment (because I am convinced he is behind it) helps the Red Sox and no one else. Sure, the Rays are good now, but how long is that going to last? The Sox get to jettison the Yankees and win their division every year, because I’m sure Gammons would stack it with the Rays, Orioles, Blue Jays and Nationals. Meantime the Mets, the big losers in this plan, would be stuck playing the current bridesmaid role of the Red Sox.

This plan makes no sense at all — just like everything Gammons writes.