Yahoo! Contributor Network Needs New, Less Idiotic Contributors

In an article titled Top 5 worst teams in history to win the World Series, Andrew Mindzak ranks the 2003 Marlins as the third worst team in the history of Major League Baseball to ever win a World Series. Or the second worst, depending on whether you’re reading from the top or the bottom. No worries. His reasoning gets no more intelligent, either way.

Not that it matters, or that I particularly care one way or the other, where some writer on the internet ranks a baseball team in a generic category made up entirely in his own mind, but if he’s going to do it, he should at least make an attempt to not sound stupid. Or, at the very least, try to sound like someone who knows what he’s talking about. Unfortunately:

2003 Florida Marlins: The Marlins finished the season 91-71 and then beat the San Francisco Giants in the NLDS before beating the Chicago Cubs in the infamous “Bartman NLCS” before taking home their second World Series title after beating the New York Yankees. Their offense was decent, but let me read off their starting pitchers: Carl Pavano, Brad Penny, Mark Redman, and Dontrelle Willis. Sure, Josh Beckett was a beast in that World Series, but Carl Pavano?

If you want to make fun of Mark Redman, I’m not about to stop you. He’s fair game. (Although, he was a monster whenever I used him in video games!) It’s the inclusion of Carl Pavano, Brad Penny and Dontrelle Willis that annoys me more than anything.

Look, I know it’s hard for the kiddies to remember Pavano and Penny for anything other than stealing a combined $80 bazillion from an assortment of teams over the last five or six years, but there’s a reason those other teams kept throwing boatloads of money at them. At one point, they were pretty good. And that point happened to be around the time the Marlins won the 2003 World Series.

As for Dontrelle Willis, well, I guess it’s hard to look back and remember that high leg kick going 46-27 in his first three years in the league, tricking the Marlins into holding onto him two years longer than they should have. You know, those first three years in the league, around the time he placed second in Cy Young voting. But, that was, like, almost six whole years ago. Who can remember that far back?

Sure, if you were to put those same names into a starting rotation today, you’d win six games over the course of a season. Maybe seven. But, I don’t imagine the 2003 Marlins trotted out 2007 Carl Pavano, 2008 Brad Penny and 2010 Dontrelle Willis. Over time, players change. Sometimes they become better and sometimes they become worse. But, confusing the past for the present and/or the present for the past is, at best, an idiotic way to put together an idiotic top-5 list.

It is, however, a great way to land a job with the New York Mets scouting department.