NYY
We don’t have to like it, and most of us don’t. But the New York Yankees are the biggest dog in baseball and always have been. In fact they’re the biggest dog in all of professional sports. Exactly because of this, most of us automatically don’t like them. But there’s no denying it. Especially in October.
It’s not that they win the World Series every season. There are other competitive teams in the sport. They didn’t make it to the playoffs at all last year in fact, and much is being made this week of them not having been to the Series since 2009. But the Yankees have more titles than any other team in North American spectator sports and more than twice as many as the next baseball team. They had to build a new Stadium because they ran out of storage for their rusty trophies in the old one.
When the Los Angeles Lakers and the Montreal Canadiens are hanging out at the bar and the Yankees walk in, those two teams just have to finish their drinks and go home. Or to a different bar.
“We should go.” It’s embarrassing.
And it’s not just the raw numbers-- statistics are boring. The Yankees have the legends and historic edge, adding even more patina. They have the logo and the lore and the players. It’s beyond me how they can even field a team with the numbers they have left-- 22 having been retired. That’s why a guy like Aaron Judge wears 99. There’s no numbers left!
There are more NYY references in literature and music and pop culture than all the other sports combined. They come from the fucking Bronx. And no, it aint 1961 anymore. And it’s true that the ‘new’ Yankee Stadium lacks the authenticity of the old park. Vincent and I went there last summer cheering for the visiting Mariners and didn’t even get sneered at, let alone knifed. There’s definitely more avocado toast & Bombay Sapphire than there once was, but it’s still a deep, generational fan base of educated baseball people who are at this moment going out of their damn minds in anticipation of tonight’s 5:08 (pdt) first pitch of the 120th World Series.
Sports fanatics are dangerously weird. Brad and his Packers; Jason and his Saints. Julie and her Sounders. My whack cousins from Boston and their ‘City of Champions’ routine. All my suffering fellow Mariner fans. But Yankee fans are a breed apart. They can afford to be, of course, with all their pennants & gaudy hardware. They can offer a fake conciliatory wink, suggesting that we’re all just fans of the game and that we just hope the best team wins in 7 games. But that’s a bunch of baloney. At the end of the day—at the end of the season, every season—they’re as greedy and seedy as any zealot.
The Yankees don’t always win the World Series. The late ‘70s were good years for them (see: Mr October) and they went to three straight, winning the last two. But that first series was a tough one, being swept quite insensitively by arguably the best baseball team ever assembled in the 76BRM. It had been 12 seasons without an appearance before that run, and it would be an even longer wait till the next one. But seemingly before anyone could say Yogi Bera it was the late ‘90s.
I don’t have any particular love for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Evan’s the only one I know for sure is rooting for them tonight (as opposed to merely rooting against the Yankees). But I hope they win. In seven…
It’s the series everyone wanted all along even though we all said we’d love to see the impossible Mets or uppity Royals. But it isn’t just Boris and Stone and Mitch willing the Yankees to the Fall Classic. We’re all suckers for nostalgia, and between the Yankees and the Dodgers, this Series will be nostalgic AF.
Play Ball…
Read more about the 1976 World Series here, in Chapter 9 of my novella ‘Like a Nepenthe.’