For those of you who don’t want to read the long post that follows, I will tell you that the short answer to all three questions is “No.”
The Yankees didn’t buy a championship because you can’t buy a championship. They deserve a lot of credit for what they accomplished this season, the Steinbrenners deserve a lot of credit for their dedication to winning championships, and yet … and yet … when to get out of the house to avoid even the possibility of turning on the TV or computer to learn anything about their ticker-tape parade, I ended up going to get my hair cut and beard trimmed and found myself confined to a a barber’s chair within a few feet of a big screen TV broadcasting that parade, I felt as if I was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay.
Baseball, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is not fair. The success of a baseball team depends upon the actions of unelected individuals who are granted absolute control over a chunk of millions of lives by a monopolistic system masquerading as free enterprise. It is, of course, nothing of the sort. The main virtue of capitalism is supposed to be that it allows people to become rich by satisfying the needs of others. In a monopoly like baseball, the unelected despots become rich without having to give any thought to the needs of the millions who root for a team.
And I am most certainly not fair, when it comes to experiencing emotions about baseball. I know this and I struggle with it. To illustrate my irrationality, and my self-consciousness about it, I offer these quotations from my book, The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan:
p.89: “After reading the Mitchell Report and venting my outrage at the rotten eggs who had tried, by cheating, to alter the competitive balance of baseball, I turned my attention to the efforts of the Mets to trade for Johan Santana, a pitcher who would deserve and receive the largest contract ever offered to a pitcher.” Note the irony directed at myself. I have a problem with people who alter the competitive balance of baseball with an injection, but I don’t have a problem with my team altering the competitive balance of baseball with a massive amount of money? Yes, I would have been bothered if the Yankees had signed Santana. No, I don’t think this is consistent of me.
p.200-201 ”Isn’t it corrupt of me to love an underperforming team with one of the biggest payrolls in baseball? Isn’t it disingenuous of me to try to pretend that the Mets still have anything to do with the colorful underdog image the New York hype machine manufactured for them back in the 1960s? … Whenever my analytical mind penetrates all the way to the deepest absurdities of my baseball fandom, my poetic mind pushes back and says, see, there’s something extraordinary here, because you don’t like irrational belief, and here you are irrationally believing in something.” What you find here is a contemptuous self-consciousness about something I write about a great deal in my book. Baseball is a place where I allow myself all sorts of primitive thrills I don’t allow myself in ANY other aspect of my life. I believe myths I know are not true. I feel tribal identification. I hate people and abstractions that don’t deserve to be hated. I become deeply attached to home turf and I scorn the home turf of others. The only reason I can accept morally the fact that I do these things when I root for the Mets is that I am always fully aware that the myths are not true, the enemies are not enemies, and that the tribe is an arbitrary community that demands nothing from me. In baseball, all of the emotions that have made human history so wonderful and so horrible are turned into a game where they may be enjoyed in brackets, where they don’t hurt anybody.
All of this is to say that if I want to fucking hate the Yankees, I’m going to fucking hate the Yankees.
I understand and sympathize with the puzzlement that some articulate responders felt when they read my previous misty-mythical-Metsy blog entry about how we’re better than they are because we don’t think we’re entitled, but someday the fates will send a small shaft of light down to lift our humble misery to the heavens, and blah, blah, blah. I can’t satisfactorily answer the astute and challenging questions posed by JD and Kiko. They are right when they say that the Yankees are doing nothing wrong and are not in fact buying championships. They are right that the Mets are morally no better and are mainly less competent. They are right to point out that the owners who stiff their fans by taking a profit and not investing in their team deserve to be criticized more than the Steinbrenners. But nevertheless I feel about the Yankees the way I feel about the Yankees. They are the not-me and I cannot root for them. To root for them because they are of New York, and New York is the place I identify with more than any other place in the world, would make them part of me. And I don’t want the not-me to be part of me. I don’t want that. To root for the Phillies, a worthy team that is merely a rival, seemed to me to pose less of an existential threat in this last World Series. I don’t defend this. I have never defended it. In my piece about how Mets fans should root for the Phillies, I made the point of comparing the Mets to Cain and the Yankees to Abel. Unpack this. Cain’s resentment of Abel was legitimate. He didn’t understand why God accepted Abel’s sacrifices but rejected his own. It wasn’t fair of God, but it was the way it was. I’m not saying that Cain was right to hate Abel so much that he killed him. But I am saying that when I see Alex Rodriguez riding on top of a limousine receiving cheers and cascades of shredded paper from the buildings that line the canyon of heroes, I want to kill him.
And I will stand by what I said in Yankee Hatred. Even if no one can reliably buy a championship, winning far more than any other team because you are always extremely well-funded and generally competently run takes some of the fun out of being a baseball fan. I congratulate sincerely Yankees fans who can identify Horace Clarke or Danny Tartabull, but I warn Yankees fans who now have too much of the heroin of winning in their system. You may be doing nothing wrong, but a time may come when you are doing nothing fun. If the Mets ever win anything again, it will be a miracle and it will feel like a miracle, even if they have enjoyed every advantage in the world. Yes, we will have more fun than you are having now.
As for the question of what is to be done, all I can say is this. I don’t want a salary cap, which isn’t possible anyway, because owners will just use it to make more money for themselves. It is my firm belief that the only way the problem of the games unfairness could be solved is if people somehow managed to get rid of the system whereby teams are owned by families and individuals. I don’t know enough about the law to know what we could have, but I dream of a world, which we can probably never have, in which teams might be managed, on a non-profit basis, by boards of trustees accountable to elected officials in counties within specific metropolitan areas, where ticket prices are kept low in the interest of the fan, where the money made is divided among the players according to formulas that reward performance plus intangibles as determined in a fair, agreed-upon way, and where every team has as much of a chance of winning in a particular year as any other team. Profits make sense in a system in which there is competition. But they are not good things in a monopoly. I can’t help but think that it would be a good thing if baseball were re-organized in such a way that it would only benefit the fans and the players. This utopian suggestion, of course, won’t do as a proposal for an alternative. I really don’t know what to say.
I am waiting until next year. And I am wrapping myself in the blanket of my myths and my antipathies. My baseball universe isn’t happy at the moment, but it is coherent. I know what I want. I want to feel good about the Mets. I want them to win. I want that level of baseball excitement that I have only felt just a few times, that is so rare, so perfect, and so memorable that just a tiny amount gives the soul the sustenance it needs to hope, dream, and suffer through decades.
*******
Check out this recent interview with me, about my book and the World Series, with Frankie the Sports Guy on WGBB 1240 AM.
Come see me talk about and read from my book on at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 10 at the South Huntington (LI) Public Library.
Or come see me talk about and read from my book at 7:30 on Tuesday, November 17 at the Teaneck (NJ) Public Library.
And please check out Michael Kimmelman’s article “At the Bad New Ballparks” in the current issue of the New York Review of Books which features The Last Days of Shea.
Dana:
(you of course knew that I’d respond to this. Let me know what the over/under bet on my word count is, and what the pool’s up to; cut me in for 30% and I’ll give you the inside track).
I certainly agree and identify with your observation that “[b]aseball is a place where I allow myself all sorts of primitive thrills I don’t allow myself in ANY other aspect of my life.” Wanting to fucking hate the Yankees because one wants to fucking hate the Yankees is (absent a few extremists out there) a fairly harmless and good natured romp in irrationlity. (I am sure you agree that the rationale is a less fitting analogue in the spheres of foreign policy, economic, religion, and more weighty aspects of life).
You will probably not be surprised that my overarching observation on your thoughtful essay is that I maintain that you (and, to be clear, many many other Mets fans) have an overwhelming passion for the New York Yankees that meets, and possibly exceeds that of many Yankee fans. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I suspect that you do not secretely (or not-so-secretely) pray for a day that resulted in the Yankee franchise folding, or, through a perfect storm of economic circumstances, upped and moved themselves to the research triangle area of North Carolina. I would also be surprised (and, candidly, disappointed) that if such a scenario ever came to pass, you hoped that all Yankee fans would burn their gear and hats and posters, and experience some mass conversion to Metsworld.
If the Yankees (or Yankee Hatred as you define it) is an integral component of being a Mets fan, then the Yankees vanishing would massively impact Mets fans. At a minimum it would force the Mets to stand on their own terms, rather as some counterpoint (whether in actual or symbolic terms to another team in town. I suspect it would be very disorienting for Mets fans. I would not be happy if the Yankees ditched town; they are an essential component of NYC. (I feel the same about the Mets, to be clear, and would not be happy if they ever moved, including if they moved to my home state of NJ.)
A key “issue” I have with Yankee Hatred as practiced by Mets fans is that it’s in large measure based on issues that are largely divorced from genuine rivalries. Its not Bklyn Dodgers-Yankees; certainly that reflected class divisions, but its principal driver was the fact that the teams butted heads over and over again in the WS so to battle for the key to the city was a real game, not back pages of the NY Post or issues with repeat victories. (Trust me, Brooklyn Dodgers fans would have been more than happy to have the repeat string of victories in the WS that the Yankees achieved in the 1950s. So would the NY Giants for that matter, who, unlike the Dodgers prior to 1947, were a team with a very proud legacy).
Its not Red Sox-Yankees; that certainly reflects political and cultural divisions between the two cities, but its again rooted in a very real and meaningful and robust rivalrly that matters between the clubs. I’ve been to Red Sox-Yankees games, and I’ve been to Subway Series games. Subway Series games are fun for meaningless bragging rights, but they a fart compared to an intense BoSox-NYY game when both teams are battling for the division. (And, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away it used to be pretty intense and passionate between the Os and Yanks). Mets-Yankees at any level doesn’t hold a candle to it. Mets-Braves, Mets-Cards, or Mets-Cubs never did. I hold out the fragile hope that Mets-Phillies can achieve something akin to that.
(Indeed, this is another reason why I was satisfied with the Yankees beating the Phillies in the World Series. I have too much respect for the Phillies, and have invested too much hope in a serious and long term rivalry developing between the squads, to cheer them on in the WS. Phillies fans, as obnoxious as some of them can be, are far more worthy and interesting counter-parties (in my opinion) to prior prospective rivals fans.)
So Mets-Yankees tends to get rooted in things, even in a playful Yankee Hatred (as you define it) sense, that make me a touch more uncomfortable than other intense rivalries. Its based in perceptions that the other team is too rich, too successful, that its fans are a bunch of spoiled brats. I suppose that the relationship between Cubs and White Sox fans bears some similarities (although friends from Chicago tell me that though there are some superficial simialrities, and sniping at North Side vs South Side, its of a different quality and tenor, in large measure because until 2005 both teams were generally unsuccessful).
Turning to your comments regarding baseball as a monopoly, I think its a little more nuanced. Baseball classically was a monopoly in terms of players, so at some level the Yankee payroll reflects a triumph over those sorts of antitrust issues (God bless Curt Flood) because it reflects the power of labor over owners. Certainly in the New York market (and in my view other markets), there is true competition. The dirty secret is that casual fans of the game (who are far more critical drivers of revenue than die-hards) flip sides all the time. No small number of fans who cheered the Mets on in 1986 were probably wearing Jeter jerseys in 1996. Front running (as the great Joe Queenan terms it) is immoral, but its a business reality.
If the Mets or Yankees don’t field a decent team, and spend and do what is neccessary to do so, people have options, and they exercise them. And they should! Life is too short and income for many is not so disposable that its worth paying $18 bucks for a parking spot, $25 for an upper deck ticket, $7 bucks for a beer, and $9.00 for a concededly delicious Blue Smoke pulled pork sandwich to watch a AA team at MLB prices. I can do that at a Montclair Jackals game, a Newark Bears game, etc. (and see some pretty hungry ballplayers in the process). Knowing that fans can and will spend their money at Yankee Stadium to see the game played at its apex, or driving 2 hours or so to Philly to see a damn fine ball club, can and should keep the owners on their toes. If they aren’t up to snuff, even in these challenging economic times, there are plenty of multimillionaires who are prepared to pony up big bucks to boast that they own a team. (If Mark Cuban ever succeeds in bying the Cubs he’ll make George look like a cheapskate).
In addition, in considering market definition, it probably makes sense to look at competition for the entertainment dollar generally. Contrary to popular myth, people in Pittsburgh truly do and will find ways to spend their money other than Pirates games. So, to sum up, there is meaningful and robust competition in baseball, both in it and outside it.
(I can also note that the internet and cable TV make it much easier for someone to seriously follow another team than was the case even 10 years ago. As long as one doesn’t mind that its harder to attend games in person, someone in Texas can as easily follow the Mets moment by moment as they can the Astros. The NFL realized this years ago, which explains why I have to suffer so many Dallas Cowboy fans who are native New Yorkers. Baseball has historically been more regional, but my sense is that MLB is hellbent on changing that, as they should be. Either way its a boost for competition.)
Your idea of some sort of non-for-profit trust is interesting to consider. I’d need to think about it some more but my initial reaction is that although the profit motive is unsavory, flipping baseball to the direct or indirect control of political motives fills me with greater dread. (I’m not even much of a fan of local gov’ts subsidizing pro sports teams in many respects.) I don’t think baseball’s monopolistic aspects really are the issue in these regards. Nothing prevents owners in any city (including the Mets) from spending what is neccessary to compete. In theory towns like LA should offer as many (or more advantages) than NY. What I probably would like to see (and I think is more realistic) is more vigorous analysis of owners rights to veto purchasers. Some owner in KC or Texas should not deprive Cubs fans of Mark Cuban as an owner.
(One practical argument for a cap is the risk that with the labor agreement coming up in 2011, smaller market teams will try to do a lock out. If they do that, its directed at the Yankees, and the Mets. That may behoove the teams and MLBPA to agree to something simply to not put the brakes on what has been a huge MLB money train since at least 2004, but bistorically if baseball can find a way to fuck things up they will).
To me, baseball is a great window into history, and as a result of that I tend to try and puncture and reject mythology, but that’s not neccesarily a good thing on my part. I hated Field of Dreams, which has caused a few friends of mine to gasp in horror and term me a malcontent cynic, (and my favorite baseball film is Eight Men Out, which probably speaks volumes about me). I loved the book The Natural and was appalled by the film adaptation’s 180 degree change to it. In the case of the Yankees (and in part driven by my appreciation of the fact that unlike the traitorous Dodgers and Giants they stayed in town), I’m much more charitable towards them then I used to be (and indeed, a part of me misses the days when they worked me up into a righteous fury). At a certain level, I may be depriving myself of some unique and fun aspects of being a fan in here. (because, trust me, when the Yankees win a game or achieve a milestone, I ain’t hooting and clapping.)
I do think mythology is powerful and important and valuable. I’m just not certain that adopting Cain as a paradigm is where we want to be, or need to be. (Some aspects of Mets history and identity bring Ishmael to mind). I’ve always been pretty partial to Moses, because he quarreled with the Lord incessantly and had an attitude problem (not that it did him much good with his constantly kvetching and groaning flock in the middle of the desert.)
JD
Dana,
Very eloquently stated, sir. And while I, for the most part, may not agree with you I certainly respect where you’re coming from.
I wholeheartedly agree that the baseball paradigm needs to be tweaked to somehow help ensure parity. (Although the revenue sharing experiment has clearly failed in doing so, by MLB not reigning in the greed of many of its beneficiaries, much to the chagrin of those teams who contribute the money.) But, I’m sorry—and I will admit I to possibly being wrong about this—a system “in which teams might be managed, on a non-profit basis, by boards of trustees accountable to elected officials in counties within specific metropolitan areas” is a bit much and carries with it the noxious odor of death. That kind of governance just makes me think of the DMV crossed with youth soccer and its blind quest for equality, which in the process dulls whatever teeth the sport may have at that level. (No, it’s not the greatest of analogies but I hope you get my point.)
However, while IMHO your suggestion takes things a bit too far, I would not be opposed to baseball’s commissioner being appointed by an impartial body and having to answer to the fans in some way, shape, or form. The travesty of the sport being presided over by someone who is essentially just another owner—and all that situation implies—is just one of MLB’s many glaring flaws.
Perhaps I’m daydreaming, but in the meantime, I believe in the fans sending a clear message to their teams: if the organization won’t make a reasonable effort to field a competitive team, and respect your loyalty and devotion to the team, they should not count on your support. If ownership would rather pocket profits and not go out there and spend on talent (within reason), or upgrade its farm system, or subsidize ticket sales, etc. than they clearly do not care about you and so, leave you no choice but to abandon the team. (JD clearly illustrated this point in a previous post using both Florida teams as his examples, and above.)
Keep up the good work, Dana. This sort of exchange is always refreshing and gives one a chance to encounter and explore different points of view. (It also means we love “this thing of ours” way too much. Ha!)
Cheers.
PS – JD, you sir—despite fierce competition from dear friends of mine—are rapidly becoming my favorite Mets fan.
As I’m just reading this at my bedtime, I don’t have time to respond fully. But I’ll make two quick points. I realize that some kind of municipal ownership system would involve all kinds of new perils. I just can’t figure out who should “own” teams and appoint a front office if owners don’t. But I hate this system of being stuck with the vagaries of a particular family that may or may not grasp the “public trust” idea I’ve espoused numerous times.
And I do think that if the Yankees were ever to leave NY, it would cause a crisis for Mets fans at least as significant as what the Red Sox are now going through now that they’ve already won two World Championships in this century. The Yankees are part of the Mets’ identity and the Mets aren’t much of a part of a the Yankees’ identity. I don’t know a way around that and I don’t really have a problem with it. Yes, we can get obsessed with them at times. But I feel that that is interesting.
Dana,
Your initial response regarding the Yankees leads (of course) to a follow-on Socratic (or is it Talmudic?) question. If the Yankees stopped being successful, and became a shadow of their former selves (or returned to the Horace Clark era), what impact would that then have on Mets fans identity?
I suspect that initially there would be euphoria among many that the Yankees had gone into the tank, and that the Mets (maybe) had become ascendant. But long term, I think, especially for those who embrace the mythology and tribal identification aspects that you allude to, something inexorable would be lost. The Mets identity vis-a-vi the Yankees is not simply a function of the fact that the Yankees also are a NYC professional baseball team. Its because the Yankees are “THE YANKEES”, arguably the most legendary, polarizing, successful, and storied franchise in professional sports. And (though at times unquestionably overhyped and falsely sentimentalized through maudlin marketing campaigns), the team has ghosts in the form of players who are larger than the team itself (Ruth and Gerhig the most obvious examples), and few other teams can compete with that – I’d guess the Red Sox, Cubs, Brooklyn Dodgers, and Cardinals are the runner ups in terms of national consciousness. (Whereas the Phillies have been around forever, but don’t tend to occupy the same mythological space as Boston, and the White Sox are still – notwithstanding 2005- most legendary for a scandal.) To be certain the Mets (especially the 1969 Mets) occupy a place in the national consciousness few other expansion teams enjoy, but if the Mets win another World Series in my lifetime, I’ll be surprised to hear a sports announcer summon up the “ghosts” of Ed Charles, Don Clenndennon, or even Tom Seaver.
It seems to me that a certain level the mythological/tribal identification aspects of baseball generally, and baseball specifically in NYC, are somewhat dependent on the Yankees occupying a special place in terms of elitism, a yardstick against which other teams measure themselves. David vs Goliath is more interesting than David vs David, or David vs Goliath’s second cousin who is in the actuarial business.
(Moreover, on a practical level, particularly for East Coast corridor baseball, having one of the teams tank becomes depressing when it goes on for an extended period. Yankee fan friends of mine admit to missing the days when Baltimore was the team to beat in the AL East, which often led to thrilling three-way competitions between the Yankees, Orioles, and Red Sox.)
I’d be very curious from a historical standpoint if fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s actively rooted for the Yankees’ opponents during the regular season. Perhaps they did – I’ve just never seen any evidence of it. Though its entirely speculative on my part, I’d hazard a guess that in the period between 1947 and 1955, Dodgers fans at some level tacitly rooted for the Yankees to take the pennant, because the Dodgers so badly wanted to beat the Yankees in the World Series given the repeated meetings they had in the Golden Age. I’ve asked a few folks older than me this question – its purely anecdotal but the general responses I’ve gotten fall along these lines:
1. Didn’t like the Yankees, both because they were successful, elitist, and were perceived as conservative and reactionary (esp post integration).
2. Thought the Yankees had awesome players and enjoyed debating the merits of Mantle, Mays, and Snider.
3. Didn’t much think about the Yankees during the regular season. Didn’t recall rooting for the Red Sox or other AL teams to clinch the pennant.
4. Enjoyed having the World Series in NY year after year and didn’t really give a shit if it pissed off fans in other towns.
5. Giants and Dodgers fans hated each other and their teams with the passion of a 1000 burning suns, and that was the most important rivarly by far.
6. No one I spoke to who was a Dodger fan recalls whether they rooted for the Giants or Yankees in the 1951 World Series. They were devastated by Bobby Thomson to a spectacular degree. Giants fans did not root for the Yankees much in those years the Dodgers played them. This in part was because anger at the Yankees for failing to integrate was quite real, and the fact that at the time, fans tended to be much more loyal to the league as a whole (NL v AL) then is the case today.
7. Many were pleased when the Yankees went in the tank after 1964. But many also were supporters of the Yankees in 1977 and 1978 because those teams had a lot of character and were the toast of the town at the time.
To be clear, this is totally anecdotal and reflects a tiny, statistically insignificant sampling size. But I’d guess that in a Mets fans ideal world (conceding that Mets fans would be happy to beat a team from Yemen or Venus if it meant a WS), the following scenario would be pleasant
1. Development of intense, long term rivarly with Philly, where both teams competitive and met up in the NLCS regularly
2. Multiple Subway World Series in NYC more often than not.
One guy’s opinion, of course.
JD
PS
Kiko, thanks, but (being a subscriber to the Groucho Marx view of “never join a club that would admit the likes of oneself as a member” I shudder to think who your other Mets fans friends are. (Perhaps I am like Pinto from Animal House – - at the top of the Delta pledge class with 2 Cs, a D and an F!
)
Just as a coda to this discussion, today on ESPN.com, Peter Gammons posted a very insightful analysis of market distortions and problems in baseball, and why the Yankees, though perhaps framing problems in the current system, are not to blame for it. Unfortunately, because it is ESPNInsider premium subscriber content, I’m not permitted to provide a link or cut and paste his analysis. What he does focus upon, though (and I think is very fair) is the problems generated by the absence of a “slotting system” in the baseball draft under the current agreement, which results in teams overpaying draftees beyond the MLB recommended amount. And that generates all sorts of problems, ranging from some owners abiding by the commissioner’s recommendation on draft signing bonuses, to other teams (like the Mets) having a huge payroll but weak farm systems because smaller market teams simply can’t or won’t pay the amounts owing on the contracts. Naturally the MLBPA wants its players to earn the max possible at all levels (especially for second or third tier players), so its a real mess. (Gammons describes the current system as :
“The fact is that the Yankees pour millions in luxury tax dollars into a pseudo-socialistic system that may be teetering on David Halberstam’s view of the late days of the Soviet Union.”
Its a real mess and I have no clue on what the solution should be. They had better come up with one because I can easily see smaller market teams forcing a lockout on the players given the expiration of the current CBA in 2011 (which may, fairly or not, may force the Yankees (and Mets) hand on changing the current economic system. I hope they work it out – baseball is rolling in dough right now but another strike or lockout could be devastating. (Hockey sure hasn’t recovered).
Yes, indeed: with major league baseball doing incredibly well financially, a strike or lockout could have devastating consequences for the sport.
And speaking of finances, sports economist and Smith University professor Andrew Zimbalist states in an article in the Wall Street Journal, that 20 of the 30 teams have reached the playoffs since 2004, with payroll accounting for only approximately 15-30 percent of a team’s success. Other factors: “front office smarts, good team chemistry, player health, effective drafting and player development, intelligent trades, a manager’s in-game decision-making, luck, and more.” Cash, of course, can be a key catalyst for some of those factors, but it’s interesting analysis, nonetheless.
Sorry, I’ve had a terrifically busy week. I will say that I think that JD is right about the Mets’ perfect scenario involving a continuing rivalry with both the Phillies and the Yanks, something along the lines of what the Brooklyn Dodgers had with the Giants and the Yankees in the fifties. I asked my mother the questions JD posed and her assessment is that the Dodgers fans (or at least those, like her, of a particular political stripe) hated the Yankees even more in the ’50s than Mets fans hate the Yankees now because the Yankees refused to integrate. They were looked upon by most Dodgers fans as reactionary and racist. I said to her, well, if that was the case you must have rooted for the Giants in the 1951 series, because the Giants, at least, were integrated. She said, no, she rooted for neither team. I said, well, but you must have liked the Giants more than the Yankees because they were integrated. No, she said, we hated the Giants even more than the Yankees. I asked her what sense did that make? She said it may not have made any sense but that was the way it was. She speculated it had a lot to do with the fact that they played the Giants more. She said that although she disliked the Yankees, she didn’t remember rooting for other American League teams to beat them. Which all goes to show that it is all irrational and organic. It is as it is.
Dana:
Interesting reflections by your mother. I’m sure that to some degree the attitudes of fans at the time reflected a very different dynamic in America, particularly from a communications standpoint. Its a period of time when discussion about baseball (and many other things) is face to face. No internet, no sports talk radio, no MLB network, and fewer columnists (and those that had the job wielded greater power). The advent of sports talk radio changed forever (in ways good and bad) the way fans talk to one another and “talk” to players. In any event, its very interesting to read her perspective.
I also highly recommend reading the WSJ op ed piece Kiko recommended. Zimbalist is a terrific sports economist.
(Unrelated note – I’d hoped to say hi in person at your reading tomorrow evening in Teaneck. Unfortunately, I’ve got to be out of the office all day tomorrow – doesn’t look like I can make it. I hope the reading goes well, and please let me know if you’ll be doing any other readings in North Jersey)
JD
Dana,
I’m friends with some hardcore Mets fans who felt much differently among themselves about this last World Series: those who despise the Bombers but rooted for them as their hometown representative or because a hatred for all things Philadelphia precluded them from doing otherwise; some “holding their nose” and rooting for the Phillies in keeping with NL loyalty; one who was incredibly offended by the mere thought that a disciple of the blue and orange would even contemplate cheering for the Yankees regardless of the circumstances; and finally, a few who wanted no part of this particular WS, for obvious reasons.
As someone who regularly states in jest that I would only root for the Red Sox if they played against Al-Qaeda–and even then, it would depend on who Osama had on the mound, ha ha–I understand the feelings of your mother and many of those of her generation. Sometimes we just feel the way we feel.
Cheers.
Here’s a link to a very interesting (and troubling) NY Times article today discussing the Mets spending on draftees. For those who want the club to develop talent from within (a laudable goal), this highlights a problem (though I’ll stipulate the slotting system generally is a mess).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/sports/baseball/20mets.html
the yankees fucking sux balls yes they do buy championships just look at the starting lineup with with the pitching and add up all the money they pay those douches. the reds dont’ buy big players with big money they play baseball and work hard at it through there farm system the way baseball is suppose to be played. eat my shit yankees and all the yankees fans out there.