#11 The City of New York City

One of the reasons that people hate the New York Yankees is that they are swoopers. A swooper is that friend who waits from afar while you introduce yourself to a group of ladies, and then, after you have made yourself seem desparate or predatory via the unsolicited approach, he swoops in without a care in the world, as if he's not even interested, as if he's not consciously free-riding on your hustle, and thus, with his seeming insouciance and cavalier charm, steals all the girls. This is doubly damning because not only does he benefit from your hard work, but the girls have it exactly wrong, for it is he who is the real predator; he's the evil empire.

In baseball the New York Yankees do this by letting the A's, Red Sox, Texas Rangers, etc. scout and develop the talent and then swooping in to cherry pick Nick Swisher or Johnny Damon or Alex Rodriguez, etc. And the Yankees are just a microcosm of New York City as a whole, which pulls this same d*ck move all the time.

San Francisco suffers disproportionately from this move because San Francisco shares the same cosmopolitan, liberal ethos of NYC, and relatedly, the same demographic of upwardly mobile girls. Phoenix might lose its talent to Miami or L.A., for instance, but San Francisco somehow always loses its talent to the big Apple. The process is not always instant but it's inevitable, which is why whenever we spot a pretty girl on the streets of San Francisco we never really appreciate the moment, we're too busy thinking about the Canadian Football League, and the day it lost Doug Flutie to the NFL.