Yanks and Yankee Fans

I do not like the New York Yankees.  Let's get that out of the way right at the outset, although regular readers, even the ones in Russia (and apparently now, Venezuela) would know that.  I have hated them with a white-hot passion that burns and glows for six decades and will for more.

I will also stipulate that there are Yankee fans who are perfectly nice, decent people.  We had dinner with one last night.  If you believe you fall into that category, you need not read forward.

Today I am, if not celebrating with schadenfreude, at least quite happy that the Yankees have lost their League Championship Series to the Houston Astros and can go back to playing golf and whatever they do in the off-season.  But this year, at least, it is not because of the team and the players.

The losing pitcher in last night's clinching game was C. C. Sabathia, a decent enough fellow of gargantuan size and, well, minimal time in the gym relative to his time at the dinner table.  Since he is a pitcher, that is not such a big deal, as he is not required to run much.  Sabathia made his name at the tail end of the 2008.  After many years pitching in Cleveland, he was traded that year for the stretch ru,n to the Milwaukee Brewers, where he pitched on very short rest on numerous occasions and, to the extent that a starting pitcher can carry his team to the playoffs, he did.

That part was good.  The bad was that the next year he signed for an equally gargantuan contract with the Yankees; along with two other players they signed, the Yankees committed about $450 million to those three.  To give you an idea how absurdly uncompetitive that was, that $450 million would have covered the Brewers entire player salary budget for over five and a half years.

Did the Yankee fans protest?  Of course not.  That had been the way their team operated for decades and it was their apparent birthright to spend as much as possible on free agents.  They had really never gone away from that strategy in the modern (amateur player draft) era; even their teams of the 1990s that their fans laughingly describe has "homegrown" averaged about 18 of the 25 players having been signed away or otherwise acquired from other teams.

The Yankees, of course, won their only World Series of the 21st Century that year.  For that, we can all be happy.

But what is different now is that the players themselves appear to be from a later generation.  Sabathia is still there, of course, but in the losing game Saturday, four of the Game 7 starting lineup were actually from their organization (that's a lot), and four were acquired via trade.  Only one, Chase Headley, the third-baseman and not a particular star, was a free agent.  And, of course, Sabathia.

The bottom line is that the players are not a particularly obnoxious set, and while it is easy to root against them for the laundry they wear, it is a bit harder to dislike the players themselves.

But that's fine.  You see, frankly, when the Yankees lose, it's a whole lot easier to cheer simply because their fans lose.  New York, after all, is characterized as a place so parochial that cynical maps are sold there depicting everything west of the Hudson River as a vast wasteland.  But I went to college where a lot of New Yorkers went, and they pretty much seemed to have borne out the stereotype.

If something was not from New York, it appeared, it was not good, or not as good, and certainly not relevant at all.  This was the attitude that carried over to their sports teams.  The Yankees had bought championships for decades; in the '50s and early '60s of my youth they went to the World Series every year except '54 and '59 and won it eight times in 15 years.  No wonder their fans seemed entitled.

Entitled fans become obnoxious fans.  Fans of the Red Sox (I am one, despite not being remotely a New Englander) knew self-doubt for 86 years until winning the Series in 2004 and 2007, after which they quickly took on the same cloak of entitled obnoxity.  Unfortunately the Yankee successes of the late '90s revived any possibly-faded unpleasantness in their already-unpleasant personalities.  They had to try to defend the fact that they were winning with the highest payroll in the game for almost all of the '90s and '00s, and for several years had payrolls about twice as high as the second- and third-place (and the other 27) teams in salary.

Aside -- the current largest payroll in the game belongs not to the Yankees (though they're close) but to the Dodgers of LA, who will be in the World Series this year.  I will leave it to others to characterize their fans, as I pretty much know none of them, and their reputation is to show up in the third inning and leave in the seventh.

So as we wake up to the pleasant notion of a World Series minus a New York team, I will make a mild concession to the fact that I don't hate the team nearly as much any more.  When they lose, I don't revel in the fact that the players are going home to the golf course.

But their fans, ah, a different story.  Schadenfreude.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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