A turning point for Major League Baseball?

The word "sport" means a fair contest with an uncertain outcome.

The emphasis on "winning at any cost" has pressured the management of professional teams to try to win it all before any of their athletes even set foot on the playing field.

To accomplish this, management tries to acquire as many top players as they can for their team. Once that is done, the actual games during the season are about as fair as shooting fish in a barrel.

The lure of a potential championship ring enables a top team to sign up more top talent for less money.

In addition to this advantage, some of them seek to widen the talent gap between contenders and non-contenders still further, by outspending the other teams. The thinking goes -- why settle for merely overmatching your opponent, when you can produce a virtually guaranteed result for the home town crowd?

In the summer of 2000, the Yankees had (yawn) won the American League again. Did that surprise anyone? At the time, they already had a fantastic roster, then they used their excess cash to buy more great athletes, simply to keep other teams from catching up to them.

Then, just when it seemed impossible to get any more boring, it did.

The N.Y. Yankees played the N.Y. Mets in the 2000 World Series. However entertaining it might be to see one New York team lose in every single game, it wasn't sufficient to save baseball's executives.

I'd like to believe that the plunge in TV ratings taught them that fans prefer true sports over yet another Yankee coronation.

I tried to imagine where this would lead us in the 2001 season. Another Yankee's coronation?

Fortunately, something happened to shake things up. The space-time continuum developed a new wrinkle -- the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The 2001 playoffs started out like the same old story. The Yankees easily, and predictably, dispatched the over-achieving Seattle Mariners in the ALCS and another Yankees World Series loomed.

In spite of my best efforts to ignore the whole thing, I inadvertently heard that the Diamondbacks had won three out of the first four games to take a "commanding" lead in the Series. "Commanding?" Hah! They obviously didn't understand the difference between baseball and Yankee-ball.

Sure enough, the Series went to a seventh game according to the script.

"Well, d'uh," I said.

Still, like Charlie Brown, who will always try to kick that football and which Lucy will always yank away at the last second, I couldn't help but watch, and, very secretly, hope.

With the Yankees ahead by two runs and Mariano Rivera pitching in the bottom of the ninth, it seemed as good a time as any for another -- "Well, d'uh!"

A few miraculous hits later, however, the Diamondbacks accomplished the unthinkable and won it all.

"Well, d'uh!!?," I sincerely uttered, as I stared at the TV in a state of shocked exhilaration.

The baseball world had changed. We could once again say, with a straight face, that it was a fair contest with an uncertain outcome.

Baseball was a sport again.