The Rich (Yawn) Just Get Richer: Yankees, Phillies Are Still the Best

What fun to envision a World Series involving Texas, where the franchise is in bankruptcy court and October is a rumor, and San Diego, where the payroll is $45 million and good seats always are available at Petco Park. Too bad such a crazy matchup only could happen inside this paragraph. That's because we look up from baseball's trade deadline this weekend and see the same two pre-eminent ballclubs, the same two stadiums, the same pinstripes, the same cheesesteaks and the same 100 miles of train tracks traveled last autumn.

If this has been an uneventful season beyond Stephen Strasburg and Ubaldo Jimenez -- has Alex Rodriguez hit his 600th home run yet ... does anybody even care? -- don't expect the Fall Classic to produce many fresh story lines, either. The Yankees will play the Phillies again, and while the drama could be of high quality, isn't variety the spice of life and sport? The last thing this lagging, slumbering pastime needs is to drift into a championship sameness based on which ballclubs have the most resources. Yet barring an unanticipated breakthrough by the Rays or Cardinals, whose managers might kill each other if they collide, the two East Coast big-revenue teams will keep making the Series a habit.

Just as the Yankees reinvest their massive revenues into their player payroll, as the late George Steinbrenner would have it, the Phillies are treating their fans with the same rewards in the National League. They're a popularity machine in Philadelphia -- first in the NL in attendance, with the highest local TV ratings outside the New York market -- and ownership is spending money to ensure a third straight World Series appearance. With the trade for accomplished starting pitcher Roy Oswalt, the Phillies now have made three blockbuster trades in the last 12 months, including the Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee deals, and granted ample contract extensions to Halladay and slugger Ryan Howard. While I'm still perplexed why they didn't simply keep Lee for one more year last fall instead of trading him, which forced the Phillies to acquire a less productive Oswalt and pay him through 2011, give them credit for being aggressive through their flurry of injuries and realizing the NL isn't teeming with great competition.