The New York Yankees defeated the Cleveland Guardians in the ALDS and will now face the hated Houston Astros in the ALCS.
With their win over the Guardians on Tuesday, the Yankees advanced to the American League Championship Series, where, for the third time in six years, they’ll play the Houston Astros for the AL pennant. The National League side of the MLB postseason bracket features two teams — the 89-win Padres and the 87-win Phillies — who each needed to pull off a pair of upsets to get this far. But the ALCS features two heavyweights who also happen to be two of the most polarizing teams in sports — two teams that, in their own way, are the most compelling villains that baseball has to offer.
The Yankees have long been the league’s great bully, a swaggering franchise with a big payroll that’s not shy about reminding you about all those championship rings. In recent years, the franchise itself has embraced the idea that they are, as former Red Sox president Larry Lucchino famously called them, baseball’s Evil Empire. (The Yankees even once went to court to confirm that status. They won.) They believe in tradition, they demand excellence, and they ooze superiority.
This sort of mindset tends to drive non-Yankees fans mad. TV producer and Red Sox fan Michael Schur, who co-hosts a podcast (mostly) about baseball with sports writer Joe Posnanski, noted on a recent episode that this belief — that the Yankees are more special than any other franchise — is instilled the second a new player arrives in “Suddenly they shave their beards and mustaches and they cut their hair and they just have drunk the Kool-Aid and joined a cult.”
The thing about a superiority complex, though, is that to maintain it — and to really fuel the hate that goes along with it — a team needs to actually win.
