Happy 49 Day!!!

 

Reasons to be cheerful—well, one anyway. 

Yep, it's that time of year again. I almost forgot—but as of this morning, every single team in major-league baseball has at least 49 losses (So do the Jets, oddly enough, but I digress.).  

What does it mean? It means that no matter how many games any of them win from here on in, they cannot mathematically win more than 124 in this combined season and postseason.

Or let me put it another way: they cannot win the all-time record, 125 games won by your 1998 New York Yankees, the greatest single team ever assembled.

I won't bore you with all the reasons for why that is again.  Oh, okay I will:

—Those 125 total wins, most ever, against only 50 losses.

—Unlike the great Yankees teams of 1927 and 1939, they played after the breaking of noxious color line. Sure, those great teams might easily have had Black, Latin, and Asian players, if such were then allowed. But 1998 was, undeniably, the greatest team since everyone was allowed to play in the big show. And thus the greatest ever.

—1998 Yankees not only swept through the American League in the regular season, the playoffs, and then the World Series, but also beat up on all the National League teams they played in the regular season (13-3; 17-3 if you count the Series, or .850 ball).

—Even though we were well into the steroid era, no evidence has ever emerged that any Yankee was juicing (at least not in 1998).  Nor do their statistics reflect the common juicing aberrations.  In other words, they bulldozed an entire major-leagues full of juicers...without cheating themselves.

Can you imagine? Before we're out of August, those Yankees out-achieved every team in the majors this year. Hell, 49 Day would've come two weeks earlier, as it often does, without the Brewers' little 14-game skein.

For all our complaints, we must thank the juju gods on bended knee that we ever lived to see such a team. Perhaps the 21st century is the karmic burden we are paying back. If so, I will gladly do so.  

My friends, we have seen the days.