Are the Yankees the "Team of the Decade"?

Actually - it depends on when you consider that the decade began. IF you consider that the decade began in 2000, then there is basis for your argument. If you consider that the decade began in 2001 (and the argument for that is that the first decade ran from 1-10 - there is no year 0 when you count the passage of time) then you are a year to early in your decision making.

Julia
http://werbiefitz.mlblogs.com/

//it depends on when you consider that the decade began. //

That is incorrect. You cannot consider the decade beginning in 2001 because that's not how decades work. If you say that the 00s began in 2001, then where do you put the year 2000? In the 90s? That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and you know it.

1900-1909 = aughts
1910-1919 = Teens
1920-1929 = Twenties
1930-1939 = Thirties
1940-1949 = Fourties
1950-1959 = Fifties
1960-1969 = Sixties
1970-1979 = Seventies
1980-1989 = Eighties
1990-1999 = Nineties
2000-2009 = aughts

I graduated from high school in 2000. That was not the 90s. That was the aughts. You wanna know how I know that? THERE'S NO NINE IN THE YEAR. The new century began in 2001, since 1900-2000 is 100 years, but the decade began the year before. This isn't hard.

Also, this completely moves away from what the entire post is about and it would have been nice if you had commented on the content of the 6 hours of work I put into all of that instead of some inane quibbling about when a decade begins. Sox fans want to believe the decade began in 2001 because it creates a nice arc for their fairy tale, but the truth is.....it began in 2000. Sorry.

Lets see where to begin.... no just kidding... it's all a numbers game and you can make numbers show anything you really want... i.e. from your numbers I could indicate that the AL East was the easiest division and had the suckiest teams since the Yankees were dominant... or that 50% of the time the Yankees choke in critical games.... LOL
~peter
Outside the Phillies Looking In
http://devilabrit.mlblogs.com

//it's all a numbers game and you can make numbers show anything you really want.//

I don't necessarily believe that. I merely took the numbers that exist and posted them. I had fun spending half the afternoon on Baseball Reference collating all that information. I wanted a decent amount of qualifiers so I included regular season and post-season numbers. I figured that would be a good indicator of how well a team performed over a given group of seasons.

//from your numbers I could indicate that the AL East was the easiest division and had the suckiest teams since the Yankees were dominant.//

Actually it shows that the AL East is the most difficult division because of how hard it is for the other three teams to be competitive with the Sox and Yankees. The fact we dominated just shows how good we were compared to the rest of the league, not necessarily compared to the rest of the division.

//or that 50% of the time the Yankees choke in critical games.//

That depends on what you consider "critical" games. Let's say for instance, you mean playoff games. The Yankees won 52 of all playoff games they played this decade. They played a total of 92 games. That means we won 57% of the playoff games we were in this decade. I wouldn't call that choking since winning in the playoffs is partly dependent on how we play and how our opponent plays. More than few times, we ran into buzz saws.

I hate to be a debbie downer but I think that the decade thing that Julia was talking about may have some validity, IE the 21st century didn't begin until the year 2001, the 20th didn't begin until the year 1901. It sort of makes sense if you think about it, why would someone using a new way of keeping track of time (the Gregorian Calendar) start off with the year 0? You would imagine they would start out with 1, since thats the first number ;) So the first year was 1 and to have a century it needs to end on 100. That would be the 1st century, the 2nd century begins on 101, and so on and so forth. So by logical continuance if the year 2000 is the final year of the 20th century, can you split up a century demarcation with a decade demarcation?
While I do still believe the Yankees overall have performed the best on a consistent basis throughout the last 2 decades, I have to agree with Julia here :P Even though I agree that the definition of a decade has been sort of muddled due to the commonality of the use of terms like 20's 30's 40's which kind of screw up conventional calendar keeping.

But all the same, go Yankees ;)

First of all, the argument of what constitutes a decade is silly. Yes, we understand that there was no year zero. We understand that the decade really doesn't end until next year, just like the 21st century really didn't begin until 2001. But, for those of us old enough to remember, the media was reporting the "end of a century, beginning of a new one" on New Year's 2000. Somewhere, all that stuff got mixed up and misremembered. :) Anyway, you can bet the major media outlets will be talking about the team of the decade for the remainder of the year, and they will consider the decade as 200-2009.

Sooooooooooooo...the Yankees HAVE to be the team of the decade. They've won just as many World Series as anybody else, they've been to more World Series than anybody else, and they've been a much more successful team than anybody else. The numbers don't lie. If the Yankees hadn't won it all this year, then the team of the decade would have been the vile Red S*x. But, unfortunately for New Englanders, the decade didn't end after last year. Even though one sports magazine (I forget which one; the Sporting News?) already jumped the gun and named the dispicable S*x as the team of the decade, it just ain't so.

Yes. That is all :D

Interesting how sports prompts such debates about when decades begin and end, about parameters of time, especially such a numbers-obsessed sport such as baseball.

I agree with Beth, the year 200 began a new decade. No one refers to 1920 as part of the 19-teens, 1990 as part of the 1980s. Let's be serious.

That said and defined, the Yankees are the team of the decade--two decades in a row, by the way, for exactly the numbers Beth laid out above--2 World Series titles, more division titles, more playoff appearances, and more World Series appearances than anyone else. Case closed.

Jason from The Heartland
http://heartlandpinstripes.wordpress.com

Above should have read "the year 2000 began a new decade," although the year 200 did as well. I'm sure such questions precipitated fierce debates among sports buffs around Rome, too. :-)

Jason from The Heartland
http://heartlandpinstripes.wordpress.com

//I hate to be a debbie downer but I think that the decade thing that Julia was talking about may have some validity,//

I'm not quite sure how, to be honest. I mean, what you'd essentially be arguing is that any year ending in zero belongs to no decade at all. Which makes no sense.

Think of an odometer on a car. When you're at say.....4,599 miles....the last nine rolls over to 0 and a new mile begins. Now you're at 4,600. It doesn't roll over to a 1. Same thing applies with years. 2009 is the end of the aughts decade in the 21st century. 2010 would be the beginning of the teens decade. 2000 wasn't in the 1990s. 1990 wasn't in the 1980s. So forth and so on.

The aughts is defined as the time period between January 1st, 2000 and December 31st, 2009. If 2000 isn't in THIS decade, then what decade is it in? Perhaps someone who feels that the decade is not over with until next year can tell me where we're supposed to put 2000.

//That said and defined, the Yankees are the team of the decade--two decades in a row, by the way, for exactly the numbers Beth laid out above--2 World Series titles, more division titles, more playoff appearances, and more World Series appearances than anyone else. Case closed.//

See for me, the numbers are what makes the case so open and shut, but knowing that Sox fans need their damn narrative so bad, I thought I'd open it up for debate. The sad thing is, rather than debating about whether or not the numbers stack up, we got into an argument over what constitutes a decade. Yeesh.

//Above should have read "the year 2000 began a new decade," although the year 200 did as well. I'm sure such questions precipitated fierce debates among sports buffs around Rome, too. :-)//

Oh I'm sure. Did the chariot races go well and did your favorite driver win? How about gladiatorial combat? Did any of them use steroids to help defeat the horde of Carthage?