Off the wall and out of the damned universe, given our choice. But instead, the Bronx Bombers, 25 times world champions, are once again in the playoffs and bidding for baseball’s first three-peat in more than a quarter century. The team’s fans in Yankee Stadium are howling insults about the crosstown Mets and the mothers of the opposition Seattle Mariners. And Yankee-haters everywhere are left with the forlorn hope that a squad from a town known more for coffee than baseball can somehow drive a dagger through pinstripes and into this monster’s heart. But the far more likely prospect of another New York triumph, this time by an aging, seemingly vulnerable Yanks team, has grown men everywhere shuddering. Steve Stoneburn, a New York City publisher who grew up in Kansas City, views the Yankees as sports’ apotheosis of “Al Gore syndrome…they lord it over everyone. They not only beat you, but make it so clear with such self-satisfaction exactly how much they love beating you.”
Such resentment, such simmering hatred (ok, maybe a smidgen of jealousy) has always demanded rituals and obligations. One Bostonian recalls collecting Mickey Mantle cards as a kid so that he could dismember them. A Philadelphian transplanted to New York refused to allow his sons to watch the Yankees on TV, fearful of the seduction and the inevitable betrayal. Otherwise mature men and women can find solace in a fervent chant of “Yankees suck,” the adolescent, yet strangely appealing rallying cry of baseball’s oppressed. The national distaste for the Yankees ballclub has always been as much civic as sports-minded. The team, with its swagger, arrogance and insufferable sense of entitleement, mirrors its host city. How to distinguish those Yankees in pinstripes from the fat cats on Wall Street in theirs? And, pray tell, what’s the difference between loud-mouthed owner George Steinbrenner (even in his new discreet incarnation) and any over-opinionated taxi-driver in New York City? Almost 50 years ago, a rival baseball public relations man likened cheering for the Yankees to rooting for U.S. Steel. If only the team had subsequently fared as badly.
Sure, it’s tempting to view good-guy manager Joe Torre’s ensemble as an exception in Yankee history, a truly likeable bunch. “Something seemed to change when Joe Torre and George Costanza came to the Yankees about the same time,” says Dick Johnson, curator of the New England Sports Museum and a lifelong anti-Yankee. But trust me. Nothing has really changed. It’s October and your team is on the golf course while the Yankees are in the fray. And the only good thing about that is at least every fan has a heartfelt, rooting interest in the baseball playoffs.
