Yankees Win Number 27...At A Cost

Players in all sports sometimes wear a jersey number to reflect something significant to them such as a loved one or their favorite player growing up. Not Joe Girardi. His uniform number 27 carries a different meaning.

Twenty-seven is the tally of New York Yankee World Series Championships after their win over the Philadelphia Phillies Wednesday night. Girardi chose the number to reflect his desire to bring the Yankees their 27th title this season. (Maybe Jim Leyland should put a big bold "5" on the back of his jersey next year. Just a thought.)

Girardi, a former catcher for the Yankees, did not rule out the possibility of changing his uniform number to 28 next season. He joked that he would have to see how much it would cost him from the player who currently wears 28. (The player is Shelley Duncan, not on the active 25-man roster.)

As Girardi's uniform number changes one more each year, the Yankees payroll likely will rise as well. The numbers involved are astronomical.

With every at-bat this year, Alex Rodriguez made more than double the Gross Domestic Product per capita of Equatorial Guinea, which stands at $31,400 in 2008 according to the CIA World Factbook.

The Yankees payroll this year was about 206 million dollars, including signing bonuses paid to C.C. Sabathia and Mark Teixeira. The pair made 9 and 5 million respectively for signing their names on a piece of paper.

The New York Yankee recipe for victory could make your stomach turn.

Manager's uniform number + obscene payroll = championship.

This is not a new thing either, many people know when Babe Ruth was told he made more than the president in a year he responded by saying, "Why not? I had a better year than he did."

This pattern needs to be stopped. Baseball needs a salary cap. All other major US sports have one, why not AMERICA'S GAME?

Let Joe Girardi change his jersey number each time the Yankees win, but if a salary cap is put in place, it will not rise nearly as often as it will as long as money can buy championships.

The New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys are the epitome of the statement "Only in America."

Only in America would players make millions of dollars playing a game that many people would leave their day jobs to play for no salary.

Only in America would someone build a stadium with seats without a view of the field, so you can watch a massive screen suspended above the playing field.

Owners like the Steinbrenners and Jerry Jones are problems with the professional sports world. The cost to build their franchises' new stadiums totals over 2.7 billion dollars.

Money like that could feed and provide health care and safe drinking water to the world for a long time. Instead it went into ludicrous American sports entertainment.

Does this rub anyone else the wrong way? Certainly it has to poke at a moral compass of almost everyone.

The Yankees won the World Series and played well all year to get there, but the temptation to refer to them as the "Evil Empire" holds truth.