In a scene in Annie Hall, Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, awkwardly and defensively plies his girlfriend Annie, played by Diane Keaton, when she accuses him of not loving her. “Love is too weak a word for what I feel,” he claims. “I *lurve* you, you know, I *loave* you, I *loff* you.”
Similarly, hate is just too weak a word for what I feel about the New York Yankees baseball team. I loathe them. I lorthe them. I lurthe them.
Now that the Yankees have won their record 40th American League pennant and are in the running to win their record 27th World Series title, I am in agony.
There are just too many reasons for me to hate the Yankees. For one, they’re just too good, historically speaking. It’s crazy frustrating to see the same team win so many championships. The next closest team is the St. Louis Cardinals, who have won 10.
For another, they cheat. To name a few instances: Reggie Jackson in Game 4 of the 1978 Series, the famed Jeffrey Maier fan interference in Game 1 the 1996 AL Championship Series, and A-Rod’s slap in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS.
For a third, they get favored by the umpires in nearly all situations. That the call on A-Rod’s slap was reversed after the play was an anomaly of the highest order. Would that that had happened to Jackson in 1978. From Chuck Knoblauch’s phantom tag of Jose Offerman in Game 4 of the 1999 ALCS to ruling Joe Mauer’s double a foul ball in Game 2 of this year’s AL Division Series, the umpires hand a lot to the Yankees in crucial situations.
Then there are Yankee fans. They *demand* a World Series win, or else they claim that a season has been a failure. And by “failure” they also mean that all of baseball has failed. The Yankees’ last Series win was in 2000. To Yankee fans, this is an *outrage*.
In my experience, the sports writers for the New York Times are some of the biggest Yankee fans going. They try to cloak their bias with a thin veil of journalistic objectivity, but it never works. For instance, Tyler Kepner published an article in the Times the day after the Yankees beat the Angels for the AL pennant this year. The title purports to analysis: “Baseball Hopes to Break a Streak of Clunker Series.” However, the lede gives away the slant: “The Yankees have been away from the World Series for the last five years, and in their absence, baseball’s showcase has flopped on a national scale.”
The last time I checked with baseball fans, the last few World Series have not been unusually bad. They haven’t been “flops”. To a Yankee fan/NYT writer, however, they have hardly even qualified as World Series. The Yankees weren’t even in them! The great shortcoming that Kepner points out, just to give the veneer that he isn’t claiming that a Series without the Yankees is a clunker? None of the last five Series has gone more than five games.
And when the Yankees swept the Padres and Braves in 1998-99, and then took the Series from the Mets in five games in 2000? Were those Series “clunkers”? No, for the NYT and for Yankee fans that qualifies as “a dynasty”.
Okay, I’m starting to get a little worked up, so I need to put all of this aside and focus on the best reason to hate the Yankees, and by best I mean “most reasonable,” the one that won’t make me look like “a raging lunatic,” someone who “rolls around on the ground gnashing his teeth and foaming at the mouth” when the Yankees win.
The best reason to hate the Yankees, bar none, is that they are owned by George Steinbrenner. While he has now handed over team operations to his sons and is more or less out of the limelight that he craved for more than 30 years, Steinbrenner has done enough to remain hateful for ever more and for that hate to transfer to the team he owns.
Let’s keep it simple. In 1974, a year after purchasing the team, Steinbrenner pled guilty to making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and felony obstructing justice. He was suspended from running the Yankees for two years by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who later reduced this judgment to 15 months. In 1989, Steinbrenner was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan, in one of Reagan’s last acts in office.
In 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life. The owner had paid a small-time gambler (read: mob affiliate) $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, a former Yankee player who was suing Steinbrenner for non-payment of $300,000 to Winfield’s foundation, payments which were stipulated by Winfield’s contract with the Yankees.
Winfield has been described as one of the most generous players ever in the game, and his foundation had done (and still does) great work in giving out college scholarships, starting rehabilitation programs for addicts, and giving out tickets for major league games to underprivileged kids. Steinbrenner, however, had it in for Winfield because of the player’s lack of performance during the World Series in 1981 and a few other issues, such as the owner’s own misunderstanding of the player’s contract. So he paid a mob guy for information on Winfield and got caught doing it. Wow.
Two years later, Commissioner Vincent was forced out of office by the team owners because they didn’t like the way he ran the league. One year after that, Steinbrenner was reinstated by new “Commissioner” Bud Selig, who in fact was the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. Gee, an owner reinstating another owner? That’s weird. (By the by, baseball has not had a real commissioner since Vincent’s departure. Selig has “stepped down” as owner of the Brewers and passed the team over to his daughter. Ha ha.)
For the sake of brevity, I more or less leave aside Steinbrenner’s crazy meddling with the management of the Yankees. In the first 20 years of his ownership, he changed managers 21 times, including 5 separate hirings and firings of the legendary hot-head Billy Martin. (Martin famously said of Yankee outfielder Reggie Jackson and Steinbrenner, “The two were meant for each other. One’s a born liar, and the other’s convicted.” That got him fired the first time.)
Finally, as we all know and probably worst of all, Steinbrenner is the man who made Johnny Damon cut his hair and shave his beard. Since he took over the team, the owner has insisted on a “grooming policy” for his players: no hair over the collar and no facial hair outside of a well-trimmed mustache. On opening day in 1973, he wrote down the uniform numbers of the players in violation of this policy (he didn’t know their names yet, but they included Bobby Murcer, Thurman Munson, Sparky Lyle, and Roy White) and ordered them to visit a barber.
When Damon played for the Red Sox, he looked like this.
Super foxy, right?
Now that he plays for the Yankees, he looks like this.
‘Nuff said.
oh god this is going to be great!
against the phillies even! why, i may even watch a game!
(no, not really, probably just the last five minutes of game . . . 5!)
go yankees!
Oh, give it up, Tim. Other teams’ fans are equally obnoxious — and it’s universally acknowledged that Red Sox fans are waaaaaay more obnoxious. Hating someone for their success just makes you look bad — Nietzsche’s got a word for it. And Steinbrenner is bad, yes, but aren’t all the owners self-involved plutocrats when it comes down to it?
Sports fans’ “reasons” for hating other teams usually strike me as ridiculous.
Still, fun post.
Baseball (and might I add all professional sports) is traditionally a venue for cheats and thugs who are forced to act as if they were scrubbed-down muppets because of ridiculous expectations that they are somehow roll-models. Sure there have been some “classy” (sports talk for non-criminal) players, but those are few and far between. Just a little realism to brighten your day.
Go Yankees! (I hope they don’t fuck up the planetary order by losing!)
I will add that Joe Girardi — when interviewed after the Yankees’ Pennant victory — said that he hopes to win the Series for Steinbrenner who “deserves another World Series win,” I almost gagged. I am a Steinbrenner hater, but I think it’s important to disconnect owners from their players much in the same way it’s important to disconnect artists from their art.
Angain: Go Yankees!
…so I was getting in the shower and I though, “did I just say roll model instead of role model?” Then I thought that it’s funny to think about A-Rod posing for a baker.
I agree that being a pro sports fan and expecting decent behavior from a bunch of billionaire jocks is like watching the Sopranos and being upset by the violence–isn’t corruption and thuggery just par for the course? That said, the Winfield business was news to me and is enough in itself to make Steinbrenner sink much lower into the swamp (and I’m not really a Yankee-hater per se, just a Winfield nostalgist). But they’re all pretty creepy, and the banning of shagginess only intensifies that creepiness thousandfold.
Dave, do you mean I’m exhibiting ressentiment? Yeah, maybe Nietzsche would call me a “hater”. I’m pretty sure he also had a word for people who love winners only because they win. What’s the French for “bandwagoneer”?
It’s not about rationality, people! It’s about stupid, dumb passion!
And then there’s Dodger Matt Kemp, who is finally getting rewarded for some
good, solid playing.
Hey Tim,
This post was very exhilarating. In a long journey, I , too, hate the yankees. And despite what others may say about the ridiculous enterprise of defending your feelings about the yanks, I thought you made a very solid argument. I was very entertained and felt better about my hatred. Very useful post. And I love the surprise photo at the end.
And just three games to go!
I’m in class right now waiting for students to finish an exam. I laughed out loud when I got to the shorn Johnny Damon pic, and my whole class looked up. Super fun post. I love that someone else has the energy to hate a team so much, so that I can just keep hating them in theory… (Plus, ever since Scott told me why he still likes the Yankees, I kind of don’t hate them as much… but I’m still rooting for the Phillies.)
eeek! wow . . . SIX to ONE! what a blowout!
(i’m so glad we went out to dinner last night rather than sitting around watching that bloodletting.)
I kind of love how our mild-mannered T-Wag becomes a raging, frothy-mouthed lunatic over the Yankees! The antipathy is so deep, so heartfelt — I can picture him writing this with a twisted, pained sneer on his face, sweat dotting his brow. Oh, the hate!
On the other hand, Timo, you presumably are a fan of the once-evil Joe Torre, now the Dodgers’ skipper? Were you a fan before, too? Or a hater then? I dislike the Yankees in theory, for many of the same reasons you stated, but I still like some of their players: Jeter, Posada, and even the admitted cheater Andy Pettitte. I used to like Mariano Rivera, but heard recently he’s a homophobe. So let’s hope he blows a couple of saves in the Series. Go Phillies!
There have been some individual Yankees I’ve been able to like over the years, especially Posada. Torre made me like him when he got all choked up after dedicating the 1996 Series win to his brother Frank, who was in the hospital at the time. Pettite’s okay, but I’ve never liked Jeter or Rivera.
Originally, I was going to include something about how many people think of me as a mild-mannered, easy-going sort of guy but don’t realize how frothy-mouthed I can get over topics such as a certain baseball team from the Bronx. Get to know me!
Get to know me!
How hard we’ve tried. But still such a man of mystery!
one to one!
2 – 1 . . . !
i remember as a kid the yankees dodgers series from the mid 70’s. we were all rooting for the dodgers, except when it came to the games that would prolong the series, to push it to seven games.
so now, in that spirit.
COME ON PHILLIES!
C’mon Tim: Damon’s base-running skills… How can you be a hater of such a heads-up player?
I don’t hate Damon. I hate that uniform and that haircut.
yeah phillies!
now new york will kick ass in true bronx-bomber-big-corporate-souless-money-hungry-thug style!
The day after Bloomberg is elected mayor-for-life, no less!
This is such an exciting series.
Go Phillies!
oh my GOD that was fun!
Cubs in ’10.
Winky!