How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yankees

Matt Bruce

Minutes after the Oakland Athletics were eliminated in this year's Division Series, I found an e-mail message from my own mother with the subject line, "Go Yankees!" Mom, watching on television, was deeply moved by the singing of Daniel Rodriguez, especially in contrast to the "cheesy" recording of "God Bless America" that Oakland had played for Game Four. If we are all New Yorkers, then does that mean that we all have to be Yankee fans?

On the contrary, several friends of mine cast the A's-Yankees series only half-jokingly as "good versus evil." People brought brooms to the Coliseum with their American flags. Some waved signs reading "Yankees go home," apparently not considering the bad timing of the message.

Behind me in the bleachers for Game Four were two people who would shout, at regular intervals, "Yankees suck!" For obvious reasons the chant is popular in both Boston and Oakland even when New York is not the visiting team. A diehard Yankee fan sitting one section over would always, always, respond to that cheer with a playa-hata-themed retort. "If you can't be a winner, be a hater," was his old standby.

Infuriating at the time, that was actually the right attitude. When the Yankees finally do lose a playoff series it won't actually be because they suck, but rather because some other team finally outplays them. I yelled out to the gentleman asking where he was from, hoping to catch a bandwagon jumper in the act. As he showed off the ripped seam in his cap, his verbatim response was, "New York, New York, so nice I said it twice."

The biggest objection that some thinking fans have to the Yankees is that so many people believe they're a more talented team than they actually are. But whenever they win, we're left with two unpleasant choices. If they actually were "supposed" to win, then popular perception was right, but if they actually weren't supposed to win, well, isn't it normal to root for the underdog?

Like many baseball fans outside the Big Apple, I've hated the Yankees, and irrationally so, for several years now. With each playoff series they win that resentment could easily grow, and has. This year was the most painful: Oakland had a good young team and its management had done everything right to win despite limited means. I had post-season strips for every game through the World Series, and expected to be there, to spend Halloween night at the Coliseum and to witness baseball's first meaningful November game.

I can't hate them anymore, not because I don't want to but because life is just too short to let one franchise be that frustrating to a person. If Rob Neyer can stop agonizing over his Royals then even the most resentful of us can learn to stop taking the Yankees personally. Joe Torre seems like a good enough guy and most of his players are likable. Sure, there's Clemens, but even Yankee fans hate the things he's done.

If this series really represented something bigger than baseball, then a case could be made for the roles to be reversed. The Yankees are the team of Rudy Giuliani and of the city that has bounced back from one of the most heinous calamities you could think of. Oakland's diehard fans are mostly college students, the young rebels of Stanford and Berkeley. A nearby district is represented by Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against authorizing military force against the terrorists.

The obvious problem with making up an allegory like that is that it's nonsense. This wasn't a clash between good and evil, it was a series of baseball games, no more and no less. It was five sporting events, during which the Yankees overcame great odds to win the final three. Life goes on, even for the A's, with or without Jason Giambi.

Assuming that the umpire was correct to rule Jason's brother out at the plate, Derek Jeter made a fantastic play that will rightly be talked about for decades to come. Whether that play was necessary to save the Yankees' playoff hopes is unknowable. My misguided 1999 paean to Troy O'Leary aside, one thing recent events have ensured is that nobody will mistake Jeter for a hero.

Jeter's play obviously affects how people perceive his defense; I have mixed emotions about that. A single play, no matter how spectacular, can't take away the number of balls hit in his direction that he lets past him and perhaps should not have. Both his lousy numbers and his highlight-reel resume are undeniable, but are they contradictory? In contrast to the Men At Work chapter on Cal Ripken, is it possible that Jeter lines up grossly out of position for most hitters?

No matter how good he is defensively, Jeter has dated beautiful women, famous women, on a far grander scale than Miguel Tejada or Rich Aurilia would ever have a chance to enjoy. Like his perceived greatness and perhaps even his perceived sex appeal, his perks in life come mostly from the good fortune of playing in baseball's largest market. That seems unfair to me, but it also happens to be the way life often works.

Nobody should shed a tear for a great athlete who makes tons of money but happens to do so in obscurity. What seems patently unfair is that the Luis Sojos and Clay Bellingers of the world get money and jewelry from being in the right place at the right time, while players better than them spend years at Triple-A for lack of a break, making less money than a hot young investment consultant.

Then again, Joe Torre's roster construction has succeeded. It probably isn't the reason for New York's success, but we have no way of knowing how any alternative would have worked. One particular Usenet regular likes to claim that baseball's best players are by definition the ones who win championships. That theory seems pretty useless in predicting or even constructing a future champion, but its appeal has really grown on me for evaluating past seasons.

I'll close with some thoughts on an even bigger crackpot than Maynard. Tom Speers, known to sports talk radio listeners as "Butch from the Cape," died of renal cancer last week. To the very end, he dissed Boston teams and touted the success of his Yankees. I always thought of Butch as somewhat of a prick, representing everything I hate about both Yankee fans and sports talk radio itself, yet some of his last words were profound.

Butch once said, "I just wish that all the people in Boston could live in New York just for one autumn and experience what we took for granted for 20 years when I was growing up." The polite way to interpret this is that he's reflecting on just how lucky the fans of New York have been. I can't begrudge them that luck as long as my own turn comes one day. The point of rooting for a baseball team is the faith that it will.

about the author

Matt Bruce is still working himself up to being able to stomach the Lakers. Suggest physicians with liberal attitudes towards Xanax at mb@strikethree.com.