Players Weekend uniforms just the latest example of overrated sports cuteness

The New York Yankees are visiting the Los Angeles Dodgers for a three-game series this weekend. The Yankees arrived with the major leagues' second-best record, 83-46, trailing the Dodgers at 85-44.

These are the two most storied franchises in our richest sport for tradition. And those uniforms speak wonderfully to that aspect of the Grand Old Game.

On the road, the Yankees wear light gray with "NEW YORK'' across the front, and the Dodgers wear white with the underlined "Dodgers'' in blue across the front.

Plus, the Yankees' home uniforms are so famed as to serve as an alternate nickname — the Pinstripes — and L.A.'s color scheme serves as an unofficial shade of color: Dodger Blue.

The Yankees and the Dodgers meet once every three years in the regular season, and to have them back in Chavez Ravine in the midst of exceptional seasons for both clubs surely made for an intense ticket scramble in L.A.

What more could baseball offer: NEW YORK in gray, Dodgers in blue.

Sorry. Not with these clowns running baseball.

Too bad George Steinbrenner is no longer with us. There's no chance The Boss would have allowed his proud Yankees, a team for which he permitted no beards for players, to wear all-black uniforms that made them look like the Darth Vader All-Stars from a senior slow-pitch league in Hoboken.

This has been advertised as "Players Weekend,'' based on the athletes being allowed to select nicknames to put on the backs of jerseys and also to dress up their footwear.

Except, the players had zero voice or veto power in choosing the all-black and all-white concepts. There are two options on how these uniforms came about:

One, baseball's marketers of merchandise feel as if white-and-white and black-on-black jerseys are going to be purchased by attention-seeking youth; or two, Majestic, the company that has lost the uniform contract to Nike starting next season, came up with these as revenge against baseball.

Either way, this put a cap on an epidemic of cute that has taken over the Twin Cities sports market.

It was a lovefest intended to show how much more personable Rosas was than his predecessor, Tom Thibodeau. As the main visual, Gersson's 3-year-old twins — a boy and a girl — were encouraged to rush the platform and sit with their father, occupying one knee apiece.

Double cute, right there.

Then, just this week, a crazed squirrel appeared at Target Field. The racing about of this rodent was found by both live and TV audiences to be cute beyond their wildest dreams.

On Tuesday, the Twins bashed six doubles, three homers, and endangered the life of poor Hector Santiago with liners as he tried to mop up for the White Sox in the 14-4 loss.

But FSN devoted two-thirds of its postgame show to the squirrel.

Out of nowhere, the Wild revealed the team was now the proud owner of a rescue dog, had named it "Breezer,'' and it would be appearing at Wild functions.

Apparently, the North Stars have been gone long enough for no one to remember that the last time the local NHL team had canines around the office — Norm Green's annoying King Charles spaniels — that the owner wound up leaving town, partly due to his rambunctious behavior with employees of his opposite gender.

On Thursday, the Wild introduced its new general manager, Bill Guerin, but not before bringing out Breezer to sniff around a bit on the stage. Guerin was offered up as a personable contrast to his crotchety successor, Paul Fenton, just as Rosas was for Thibs.

Comes to cute, though, Breezer is a poor second to the Rosas twins.

There is a way the Wild's mutt could earn admiration: Hang out at Target Field and, next time the squirrel shows up, end that nonsense.