It looks like this baseball season is over before it even started.

For all of us out there that aren’t members of either the Yankee or the Red Sox nations, this off-season has been one of the most frustrating in recent history. While other teams are trying to set up a respectable roster to bring into the 2004 season, these two Northeast monsters are simply eating up all the talent.

So the Yankees got A-Rod and now Red Sox fans are wiping their eyes with the same tissue that Nomah is using because the management wasn’t nice to him. Please … relax.

Just look at the names: Nomar Garciaparra. Curt Schilling, Pedro Martinez, Keith Foulke. Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe. When a fan of a financially strapped team hears Red Sox fans complaining, it’s hard to feel sympathetic.

We small-market fans have to watch from the outside as this sandbox fight between the Yankees and the Red Sox swings out of control yet again. As our teams fill positions with question marks, these two storied powerhouses are doing it with exclamation points.

I almost feel bad for the rest of the teams in the American League East. How are teams like the Devil Rays and the Blue Jays supposed to stand a chance? I wouldn’t be surprised to see half the guys on the Tampa Bay roster wait outside the Red Sox or Yankees’ locker room for autographs.

Then there are the Orioles, who for all intents and purposes gave its best effort to turn the face of the organization around. After several losing seasons the Oriole management decided to actually open its wallet and purchase some talent, namely Rafael Palmeiro, Miguel Tejada and Sidney Ponson.

If the Birds had this team last year, there is a chance they would have finished third and perhaps given the Sox a race for the wild card. Not this year. Sure, the Orioles might put up a fight, but it’s pretty obvious that neither the Sox nor the Yankees have much to worry about.

One of the most common arguments I hear is that the Yankees buy rings, and I fully agree. But what happens if the Red Sox win it all this year? Will it really be that much sweeter to see the Sox win the Big One by the same means that their arch nemesis has done year in and year out?

I’m not in any way an advocate for the way that the Bombers have gone about achieving their success. If anything, the Bronx cash cow is ruining the very essence of the sport. So when the Red Sox start fighting fire with fire, the truly ugly business of the game begins overshadow this usually thrilling rivalry.

I more or less expect it from the Yankees. When they got Gary Sheffield, it didn’t phase me, it was just George flexing his financial muscles once again. Then they got A-Rod, and it was time to give every sports anchor in America something to talk about for the next eight months.

When the Sox beefed up their already stellar pitching staff with Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke, it became imminent why John Henry spoke out against a salary cap last year. Sure, he supported it this season, but to me it looks like a gamble. He is looking for 2004 to be an all-or-nothing season.

If anything this corporate arm-wrestling match gives the other fans some bittersweet entertainment, it gives us a pair of front-runners to root against. It is that Laker-esque feeling that everyone got when future Hall-of-Famers Gary Payton and Karl Malone went to the limelight of Los Angeles, just to get a ring.

It brings out that engrained human nature to root for the underdog, which in the case of baseball this year, is anyone besides the Red Sox or the Yankees. If I see the Yankees go on a three-game skid this year, it’s going to be hard to not give a little smirk.

Of course there is that whole, “but we haven’t won since 1918, how aren’t we underdogs?” thing, but they aren’t. Any team that has two of the top five pitchers over the last decade, on top of the most explosive lineup in baseball is hardly an underdog.

Unfortunate maybe, but not an underdog.

So when next season comes and the rest of the nation watches this rivalry once again take over our television screens and newspapers, are we really watching another chapter of an age-old rivalry, or just the microcosm of what’s wrong with baseball?

When the crisp October air comes to remind us that the most talented boys of summer are facing off yet again, I hope it has the same feeling. That teams with talent, within normal financial constraints, beat out those that simply bought their way to the top.

Sort of like last year.

Bob McGovern is a Collegian Columnist.