Once again, it’s the Yankees. I don’t know what to do with myself.
I live with Yankees fans. My best friends here are Yankees fans. Some of my other buddies, however, are Mets fans, Orioles fans or Red Sox fans. So where does that leave me, the Reds fan, sitting on my futon in my Pokey Reese jersey?
Should I hate the Yankees, as many tell me to? I’m certainly not going to buy the argument that I should root for them because of Sept. 11. In fact, they probably don’t need it with all the bandwagon fans that go to the Bronx or turn on MSG for each game. Probably 75 percent of Yankees fans can’t name a starter from the 1991 squad, and probably 75 percent don’t watch more than three regular season games before September. I bet about half didn’t even know that Lou Piniella had managed the Yankees. I could go on forever. Literally …
Fans aside, I have concluded, through many sleepless nights, that the Yankees are too hard to hate. They have the ever-glorified “intangibles;” they play like warriors; they aren’t cocky; they realize their role in a city that claims to need them. In the same way it becomes impossible to hate Michael Jordan, it’s hopeless to try and hate Derek Jeter when he streaks across the field to flip a pass to Jorge Posada or risks his body in a flipping foul ball catch. There’s no way Joe Torre can be vilified. In fact, the only bad thing coming out of the Bronx is George Steinbrenner, and he’s more of a punchline than a punching bag. Being mad at the Yankees is hard.
So why, then, do so many baseball fans hate the Yankees?
The answer is really quite simple. The reason you hate the Yankees is because they win and your team doesn’t. In Monday’s Washington Post, columnist Jonathan Yardley, a self-professed “lifelong Yankee hater,” described why he has reviled the team so much, for so long. That hate, he says, is “a condition bred of that endless succession of Yankees championships won in the 1950s and early 1960s, won with an icy inevitability to which the only appropriate response was utter, implacable loathing.”
He’s right. If the Red Sox had 25 titles, too, then the hate out of Boston wouldn’t be, well, as great. It’s why the Cardinals hate the Redskins, but the Redskins can’t hate them back. NC State hates North Carolina, but UNC is much more preoccupied with Duke, and Duke with UNC. When David can’t bring down Goliath, and David knows it, his only response is jealousy.
But no, the reason you hate the Yankees is because they’re buying those rings, bolstering their roster with the ease of a well-financed paycheck en route to another blemished World Series, right? But if money brought home the bacon, then Albert Belle would have been MVP of the 1997 Orioles World Series team. Alex Rodriguez and the Rangers would have overrun the Mariners sometime back in July. And how easily you forget about Manny’s big paycheck over in Boston …
Winning brings money. Being in a big market brings money. But that’s not an excuse. Cleveland, Baltimore and Texas all have big bankrolls, too.
In terms of those infamous free agent signings, it is true that Mike Mussina may have been paid handsomely to come to the Yankees. His game three win over the A’s in the divisional series pushed the Yankees on into the ALCS, and now they have the pennant. Would they have won that game three without Mussina? Maybe, maybe not. But he won that game with just as much heart as skill, and his paycheck was definitely not on his mind while deciding whether or not to throw heat to Jason Giambi.
And that heart is what makes these Yankees about more than just money. With the exception of Mussina, Roger Clemens and Orlando Hernandez, most Yankees were either developed within the system or were castaways from other organizations. Bernie Williams, Jeter and Alfonso Soriano weren’t free agent signings. Chuck Knoblauch, Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius weren’t, and aren’t, all-stars. They win because they play as a team, they play beautifully, and they play in October like some magical power just flipped on the championship switch.
Giuliani’s son annoys me, Jersey boys yelling “TINO!” annoy me, Tim McCarver annoys me and the bandwagon fans annoy me more than anything.
But the Yankees, out there on the field, do things that you can’t believe. Was anyone sitting back in their chair yawning when Soriano hit that walk-off homer, or when Jeter saved that run against Oakland? Does winning bore them, and does it bore the viewer? No, because they find new ways to do it, and they do it better every time.
I have no doubt in my mind that the Mariners were more talented than the Yankees this year, and the A’s stacked up just as well. However, the untouchable magic that makes Yankee victory routine keeps us watching. Even Red Sox fans. I want to hate the Yankees because they won’t stop winning, but I can’t.
Maybe I’ll hop on the Bernard Gilkey bandwagon (if there is one), and I’ll probably hope that Schilling throws some junk at Jeter. But if the Diamondbacks fall where better teams have fallen before them, I won’t be too upset.
