RobertEmmet

The Shat

By Robert Schlesinger

I have a theory about William Shatner: 10-15 years ago, he had an epiphany. Either he could go on being an unintentionally farcical B-actor or he could embrace it and by doing so transcend it. He could go from being Shatner and instead accept his clownsish reputation and become … Shatner.

The Priceline commercials followed and then Denny Crain in the late, great “Boston Legal.” James Tiberius Kirk was a great leader and Denny Crain a clownish figure, but as a friend of mine observed to me tonight, Captain Kirk never won an Emmy.

With today’s signing of the elite first baseman Mark Teixeira, the New York Yankees had their Shatner moment.

The Yankees have long since been universally reviled as big spenders, and with good reason. But they still struggled against it in their own way. People forget it, but for a long time the Yankees made a point of not signing the biggest contracts in the game. They let the Rangers sign A-Rod to his absurd deal; they let the Dodgers ink Kevin Brown to a ridiculous deal. The Yankees signed big deals, and a lot of them, but never the biggest ones.

And while another friend of mine suggested to me on Facebook today that “the yankees *always* get the guy. ALWAYS,” the fact of the matter is they didn’t. They would choose a Mike Mussina over a Manny Ramirez, a Randy Johnson over a Carlos Beltran. One, but not both. They had their limits, even though they caught crap for not having them.

No longer.

Limits? Bah. Why have limits when you can … not have limits. Why sign the best free agent on the market when you can sign the three best free agents on the market? Today the Yankees embraced their caricature, and are a better team for it. And … the Sox and Angels are worse. (For the record, the O’s are an irrelevancy anyway, while the Nats would have been fools to devote a quarter of their payroll to a corner infielder.)