Are the pressures of NYC simply too much for professional athletes?

I've said this before, but following the meltdown of Domingo German, it needs to be repeated: 

If you eliminate the financial advantages of playing in the nation's largest market, as the fathers of U.S. pro sports have done, you end up with perennial losers in New York, the city that never sweeps.

It's no coincidence that in the modern era - where billionaire titans of capitalism run their leagues via socialist mechanisms, most notably the salary cap - no NY sports franchise has been dominant.  

The Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Islanders, Devils... none has strung together a repeat champion. (Frankly, if you exclude pro soccer, nobody has won diddly, as the graph below shows.) 

If you forbid NYC owners from outspending their small market clones, you leave them at a huge disadvantage. 

NYC peaked in the 1940s and 1950s,
and hasn't won much in this millennium.
 

LA is built around stardom, with winding hillsides devoted to separating Kardashianic wealth from the Mickey Rourkes of poverty. But NYC athletes can never escape the urban stresses that surround them. From hookers to hangers-on, from talk radio boars to blogger geniuses (like us), from street videos to lunatic stalkers, NY stars  face distractions unlike anything experienced in suburbanite Kansas City or Pittsburgh.

I'm not excusing the Yankees for this year's bumbling, stumbling cast of blow torch butchers. Somehow, the front office squandered about $270 million, building a lineup that cannot qualify for the expanded wild card. And German's personal setbacks - this is the third suspension in his rather short career - are his alone. Last I looked, nobody else on this team has such an epic history of self-immolations. 

Still, I wonder: Was throwing a perfect game, and suddenly facing the harsh national spotlight, the last thing he needed? (Certainly, what German needs most is a trade to a small market.)

As long as the Yankees cannot - or, in Hal Steinbrenner's case, will not - vastly outspend their opposition, these will be middling teams. We should not blame this enduring Yankee malaise on Giancarlo Mendoza or Jackie Donaldson - they are merely the result of financial pressures that brought them to NYC. The Yankees eat other teams' mistakes, at their own expense.

In a nutshell, Bud Selig won.