In a blog called Clutch Bingles, a blogger named Brian mentions the fact that “Dana Brand wrote a book that fondly remembered The Last Days of Shea. …It’s one of the many things I genuinely love about Mets fans over Yankee fans. Mets fans lost their oft-derided stadium (even oft-derided among themselves), and they still mourn it. … Yankee fans, meanwhile, lost a palace with an unmatched history of championships (albeit one with a ’70s disco make-over) and replaced it with a gray gaudy mall — and Yankee fans hardly shed a tear for the old place … There’s no similar poetry devoted to the final days of old Yankee Stadium, not in the same vein as in the book by Brand, who obviously speaks for a lot of Mets fans. It’s like the Yankees brass (with the help of The City) plowed over a community park to drop an exclusive baseball version of the Palisades Center into the South Bronx, and Yankee fans loved them for it, even if that mall hardly loves them back.”
In the superb blog Subway Squawkers, the excellent Yankee blogger Lisa Swan wonders what people think now who had once said that they’d rather have Wright and Reyes than A-Rod and Jeter. It is a fair question. The stocks of Wright and Reyes are down at the moment. But I still enjoy rooting for them to find their way, more than I’d enjoy rooting for Jeter, and much much more than I’d enjoy rooting for A-Rod. When I noted this on Lisa’s Facebook page, it prompted several Yankees fans to marvel at comparably absurd preferences Mets fans have expressed to them over the years. One woman marvels that her Mets fan husband says that he’d rather have Ike Davis than Mark Teixeira. One man mentions that back in the ‘70s, the guy who owned his local deli said he’d rather have Doug Flynn, Ron Hodges, and Dan Norman than Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Mickey Rivers.
Of course I’d rather have Ike Davis than Mark Teixeira. I too was glad to have Doug Flynn, Ron Hodges, and Dan Norman rather than Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Mickey Rivers. Wright and Reyes versus Jeter and A-Rod? No contest at all. These sentiments are relatively uncontroversial among long-time, die-hard Mets fans and they are entirely incomprehensible to Yankees fans. This is how the fan bases can be told apart. It is incomprehensible to Yankees fans that we would actually prefer players we know to be inferior to theirs. We write books and poems of love to a mediocre newish stadium and they can’t even produce a tear (let alone a book or a poem) for a truly historic old one. They can’t comprehend that we don’t envy them. They think we should. We don’t. We feel superior to them, precisely because of the perversity and the sentimentality that prevents us from envying them.
As I’ve said before, Yankees fans are just as good people as Mets fans. But if the only way I could be a baseball fan was to be a Yankees fan, I wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t look like fun to me. For all of the disasters and absurdities, I can’t help but find Mets fandom fun.
So here we are at the first Subway Series, a psychological point of the season that both Mets fans and Yankees fans know is important. I’m psyched. Because I know that anything can happen. Yankees fans also know that anything can happen. But they are not as much at ease with this fact as I am.
One man mentions that back in the ‘70s, the guy who owned his local deli said he’d rather have Doug Flynn, Ron Hodges, and Dan Norman than Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Mickey Rivers.
I am almost famous now.
I think people become fans depending on either the time when they were born or Family history, My earliest memories (I was born in 1956) was 1961 and the Mantle/Maris HR race and also the History of the Yankees, I first started following Football with Joe Namath, I did not care about the History of the Giants, My cousin is a few years younger than me and his first vivid memories is 1969 so he is a Met Fan for life,
But of course nowadays because of TV many fans become of the teams that are winning when they are young, So you may have someone who is a Yankee/Cowboy/Laker and Red Wing fan.
Larry, it’s funny you should mention that. I was born in 1954 and also came to baseball awareness during all the hype about Mantle and Maris chasing Ruth’s record. When I excitedly told my mother than Maris had broken Ruth’s record, she very seriously told me (she and my dad were from Brooklyn) that we didn’t get excited about the Yankees in our family. A new team was coming to replace their beloved Dodgers and it was called the Mets and I could root for them. End of story. That’s literally how I became a Mets fan. I had no choice. I would have been disowned. But I have grown to embrace it and love it and even mythologize it.
I don’t want to start a war here, but maybe Yankees fans are inherently less articulate than Mets fans? It’s a generalization I know, but couldn’t it be similar to being left-handed? (The excellent Yankee blogger you mentioned excepted.) Just a thought…
I went to the disco made-over Yankee Stadium a few times, and the best part about it for me was Bob Sheppard’s voice. It was like Cecile B. de Mille as “God” in “The Ten Commandments”. I loved it but it scared the crap out of me!
The voice of “God” notwithstanding, there was always something sinister about Yankee Stadium. Shea was like an old sweater; it was worn and threadbare in spots, but it wrapped itself around you like a good friend, keeping you “warm” and safe. If you think outside the quotes on “warm”, the reality was that you were usually freezing your ass off. But, I never minded that.
Gonna win the series tomorrow baby.
Nava, I do doubt that Yankees fans are less articulate overall, but I suspect that articulate Yankees fans may not find their Yankee fandom to be an aspect of their existence about which they are tempted to become poetical. It’s different with Mets fans. Our fandom is full of tragedy and lyricism. Their fandom, as it is mythologized, is poetically uninteresting, so if a Yankees fan is a poetic soul, they save the poetry for other stuff in their lives. I would love to read a book by a Yankees fan who, born in the Bronx or to Bronx parents to inherit the great tradition, comes of baseball age rooting for Joe Pepitone and all that comes after, and then endures the Mets Eighties and the obscurity of his once great tradition. That’s what I’d like to read.
Anthony, you said it. Great games so far, and some hopeful signs for the Mets.
I never quite understand why Wright/Reyes get linked to A-Rod/Jeter. The only analgous player in that mix is Jeter – because he was homegrown talent by the Yankees. A-Rod is a supremely talented player but he’s the epitome of a mercenary, and most Yankee fans I know respect his talent but don’t love him (in no small part because of roids, HGH, and his prima donna personal antics), and I wouldn’t be shocked if a lot of them would prefer to have someone come up from the ranks. Other than guys like Reggie Jackson (who, before Oct 1977 had a dicey relationship with Yankee fans) the guys who get the most love in the Bronx tend to be homegrown – Jeter, Rivera, Petite, and Posada. 99% of the time on the radio you hear callers hoping that Gardner’s a permanent replacement for the latest mercenary Granderson.
Point is that I think the better comparison, setting positions aside, would probably be Jeter/Posada to Wright/Reyes. (Also have to say that despite the fact that I spent years wanting to throw a rock through my TV every time Jeter was at bat, I don’t really have any issues with him now. He plays the game the right way, and never shows anybody up. Still hate the way he calls time at every at bat, though. The fact that he often doesn’t back up A-Rod in the press is a plus in my book).
Thought your comments on the 1977 and 1978 Yankees interesting. Even as a kid who was a Mets fan I liked Munson a lot, also liked W. Randolph, and Gossage. I was only in 3rd grade so have no recollection of what Mets fans attitudes were about the Yankees 1976-1978. I recall none at all other than general bitterness that the Mets were embracing suckitude at its highest levels, and the fact that Seaver got traded for 4 dudes who were the functional equivalent of a batting tee.
I’ve been to New Yankee Stadium twice. (Love the Palisades Mall reference and agree with you 100% on the parkland fiasco.) I thought it was nice, but definitely prefer Citifield, and not merely because I like the team playing in the latter way more. New Yankee Stadium brings to mind the haiku from Wayne’s World “We’re in Wayne’s basement….but its not Wayne’s basement.” Something intangible from the old ballpark has been inexorably lost – it feels like an attraction at Epcot Center in someways (though restoring the full frieze and original Gate D touches was nice). Citifield also has, on the whole, better food (though I do wish it had cheesesteaks).
JD
We love ‘em when they’re up and we still love ‘em when they’re down, and we look for any positive among the negatives! That’s what a true fan does, and I remember going to Shea when the team was pretty bad and only the faithful showed up — but wasn’t it great to watch the young kids coming up and imagine the shaping of a team that was going to win. There are 3 kinds of fans: the ones who show up no matter what the team is doing; the ones that come back as the team is starting to win; and the ones that only follow front-runners, have no emotional investment except for the winning (and I wish the third group would stay away! They are the booers who only want success). Speaking of positives, the Hernandez/Darling broadcast Friday night was so good that it almost (but not completely) mitigated the loss.
Dana,
I was being sort of tongue-in-cheek about that aspect of Yankee fandom. I guess I was exhibiting a bit of inarticulateness of my own!
The most poetic Bronx-born souls I’ve ever run across have been of Italian descent from the Arthur Avenue area. They really seem to identify with that aspect of their heritage similar to the way Brooklynites do.
As for Yankee books, the best one I ever read was “The Bronx Zoo” by Sparky Lyle.
You do realize you are breaking new ground with your books – maybe one day, a Yankee fan will emerge who will follow your example.
Thanks for the plug, Dr. Brand. You may not remember me, but I was an English student at Hofstra in the first half of the Nineties. I had been enjoying your Mets Fan book when my wife and 3½-year-old son came home one day with a copy of your Last Days of Shea book. Seems my baseball-obsessed toddler spotted it on display at our local library branch and liked the cover — he apparently has good taste at his age.
@Nava and @Dana: The lack of poetry from Yankee fans might merely be that the bombast of the recent vintage of the team (more bombast, dare I say, than at any other time in the Yanks’ long history, in my opinion) has simply pounded it out of them in an orgy of excess. As someone who’s been on both sides of the fandom divide, I can say there are poets on the Yankees side, but most of it is maudlin stuff an enlightened reader couldn’t stomach beyond age 8.
There has been tragedy with the Yankees, but it’s largely been off-field (Munson’s plane crash, Lou Gehrig’s fate), some of it self-inflicted (Mickey’s and Billy Martin’s drinking leading to their ends). Somehow that perspective has been lost these days in a wave of corporate greed and the general repugnant slide the franchise has been on since Clemens came over for David Wells in 1999. I had enough. Let’s go Mets.