Personally I find this line of reasoning to be tired and lazy. Everyone has their own ideas of what ails baseball from a business perspective, and certainly the Yankees are playing a different game than everyone else these days. But counting the Yankees' titles and chalking them up to dollars alone is nonsense.
The Yankees payroll is obviously gigantic, but it did not come out of general lockstep with all of the other teams until around 2002. Before then they didn't always lead the league -- they were behind the Orioles in 1998, for example, -- and when they did lead the league, only a couple of million bucks separated them from a pack of the next highest payrolls. In fact, 2002 was the first time they were as much as $10 million higher than anyone else. Before then: four titles in the Jeter era.
The Bombers' payroll exploded in 2002 and continued to escalate through 2008. They somehow managed to buy no titles during that time. Much is made about signing Sabathia and Teixeira this year, but their 2009 payroll is actually lower than 2008's.
I'm not going to drink the Yankee-fan Kool-Aid and say that there's some level playing field out there. But if the past fifteen years have shown anything, it's that even if you can buy general competitiveness, you can't simply buy a World Title. To get that, you have to be smart, you have to execute and you have to be a bit lucky too.
The Yankees were all of those things this year, and to leave any part of that out is to fail to tell the whole story.
