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Christopher Shea
Dan Lewis
The Pitying of Fools
Dan Lewis · 10 October 06
The Yankees and their fans are never eliminated as an afterthought. They are always taken down in a public execution. They are led to the gallows to the raucous cheers of the gathered crowds. They are read the charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against them, and they are always the same. Their misdemeanor? Gluttony. Their high crime? Nobility. And then they are very publicly hanged while the throngs roar with approval. The masses will not be denied their opportunity to watch the mighty fall. And that’s okay. It’s part of what we Yankee fans sign up for. Some of us make a choice. Some of us are born into it. But all of us wouldn’t trade it for the world.
-Bleeding Pinstripes, an MLB.com blog
It’s hard to not enjoy this a little. Setting aside the matter of my 30-year allegiance to the Yankees, it’s good for baseball when payroll is shown to be a nonfactor in postseason success.
-Joe Sheehan, of Baseball Prospectus
The Detroit Davids have slain the Gotham Goliaths. This entire episode has been a source of great pleasure to me and to many of my friends as we’ve sat back to enjoy it two ways. One, the majority of baseball fans in the country are Tigers fans, for the time being, and we’re basking in that warm and funny feeling. And two, a corollary of the first really, we’re not above a little schadenfreude. Well, a lot of schadenfreude.
The smiting of the Yankees is always fun. The media in general goes berserk, and the New York media in particular taps out a week-long dirge of pure shock and grief, the kind that commemorates a sudden, violent death. To an outsider’s ear, the music is typically comic-sweet, but this year is special for Tigers fans. We’re dressed to the nines, as we’ve been upgraded to the velveteen imperial suite, the perfect place from which to watch the solemn requiem bloom into a full-blown opera. The fat diva sings and bleats and wails away at a libretto with a leitmotif of finger-pointing. Even Yogi Berra has left early to beat the traffic.
This is the result of hubris. A lifetime of auto-fellatio can injure the back to the point of breakage, and that is what it’s like being a Yankees most of the time. This whine flows ubiquitously: “They haven’t won a championship since 2000!” The rest of us usually follow with a sardonic “Aww shucks, that’s a crying shame”, but it’s important for us to realize that it is a crying shame. The crying, moaning shame is real for them, and that’s what counts. They’ve won 26 crowns, but twice as often they have had to recoil in the horror of failure.
Now put that aside for a moment and think about the quotes above. They are examples of self-loathing, which is always present, at the very least, in the dark recesses of the Yankee fan’s mind. They are at the forefront and amplified, however, at times like these because, for one thing, they know that the reason they are reviled is perfectly legitimate. For another thing, the Yankees are usually in 1st place, and the self-loathing is repressed so that the fans can pretend they’re enjoying it as much as the rest of us would be. Every time they win it all you will hear one of them say that, for such-and-such reason, this is the sweetest of them all.
Don’t believe it. They have to tell themselves that lest they face getting bored with their little cakewalk.
A lot of star ballplayers join the Yankees, looking for a title. What would the ring mean to Alex Rodriguez or Bobby Abreu? Do they want the thing, the actual physical ring, merely for fashion purposes? I can imagine there is some measure of pride and joy in any World Championship, but how acute can it be when the biggest reason you are part of it is that you’ve hand chosen the best and richest team? Not very, by my standards or by the standards of, say, a Red Sox fan.
This logic can be applied to many of the Yankees “faithful”, too, and they know who they are. Some of them were born and raised with the Yankees, and that’s all well and good. Your father and his father were such fans, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Some of these “Yankee Pride” goofballs, on the other hand, were not born with it coursing through their veins, so they’ve chosen to inject it for the nice high. Sometimes, even, such a fan is also a player named Derek Jeter, who grew up in Kalamazoo and claims to love his father, who was a Tigers fan.
The price they didn’t realize they were paying was an addiction to dominance. Every other team’s fans get a little leeway, but they still have had to learn to take the good with the bad. Yankees fans are the only ones who, five Octobers running, have had to walk around with the pitiful dirge in their ears, and they’re the only ones who, in the good times, have had to expend energy ignoring the fact that for every ounce of expectation, and ounce of joy is removed.
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Comment
- Sorry about this one, Judd. For what it’s worth, this is inspired by the Yankees fans I saw gloating in Boston and by the ridiculously overblown coverage of the fallout.
— Dan Oct 10, 12:26pm # - Oh, it’s so much fun to live in new york right now. Listen to these jackasses, and then cleanse your palate with this and this and this.
also, the yankees could solve their problems by getting rid of jeter
oh, and you should link to those blogs you’re quoting up there.
— j Oct 10, 3:01pm # - I think back to that Pizza puff-stuffed yankee fan that held up that sign “Yankee Reign Delay” during the game 2 rainout. he was all proud with his push-broom moustache and big Tom Brookens glasses. All the papers put that picture of the sign weilding Yankee fan on the front page of the sports page as if to say that the rain only prolonged the agony of the ensuing Tiger excecution. Well all i have to say is that Artie Lange has to make out with Blue Iris because the Mets went deeper into the post season than the Yankees. Put that in your Bobby Abreu! Also, you know damn well that Jeter grew up a tiger fan. Jerk!
— Michael Oct 11, 7:48am # - Haa haaa haaa!!!! Wweeeeee!!!!
— Jefferiah Oct 11, 5:49pm # - Most of what’s written there is true. Hell, I hate being a Yankees fan. There’s no fucking joy in rooting for this cobbled-together bunch of juiced losers. I became a Yankees fan when Winfield and Mattingly and Rags were my boys, and cemented my fandom when Jimmy Key was the ace of the staff and we relied on guys like Leyritz and Brosius in big moments. Jeter wasn’t the Capitan, he was the Rookie.
Nothing will ever be sweeter than 1996, and the dynasty years, taken as a whole, were remarkable. What non-Yankees fans rarely get is how unexpected and remarkable that was at the time. We had just come out of the shittiest stretch of Yankees teams in 80 years. The Yanks had not made the playoffs since 1981, when I was 2. The big hitters on recent Yankees teams, before 1994, were guys like Mel Hall and Steve Balboni (“Bye Bye”). Todd will argue this point until he dies, I know, but 1996 loses nothing to 2004, from the young Yankee fan perspective. Actually, it’s probably only true for a particular age range, those fans who became Yankees fans in the early 1980s, stuck it out through the miserable years (my glory years are the shitty years!), and then witnessed 1996. This doesn’t fly against your point, Dan – there were no expectations of the kind we have now.
I have no idea how I would view this current team if they actually made it to the World Series – people change when it’s all on the line, and new personalities emerge. I do know that I’d care a lot more about this team if Nick the Stick and Soriano were still around. The problem with being a real Yankees fan is that the Yankees corporation makes it hard to give a fuck. Giambi sells more tickets, so get rid of Nick. It’s hard to fault management for getting A-Rod, but did they do it because he’s a great player, or a great marketing tool? I want to watch a team come together out of parts that were not pre-packaged – a team should be MORE than the sum of its parts, not LESS. That seems impossible from now on, because the Yankees simply make too much money to let that happen.
I’m not renouncing my fanhood, but it’s weird to think how little I cared about the loss this year – and it’s not because I’m not a Yankees fan. It’s hard to explain. I don’t really understand it, myself. I don’t think that it’s an expectation of dominance, not for me, at least. It’s more of a dissociation from the current team, which doesn’t feel like a team so much as a pickup squad.
Anyway, congrats on the Tigers – half my family is in Michigan, so I’ll definitely be rooting for you guys, for their sake.
Oh, and I have been in non-baseball mode until the World Series – it’s hard for me to watch the playoffs after my team is out, but the WS is special. I’m glad to see you have acquired some hecklers while I’ve been gone.
One more thing (and here I take out my anger) – I maintain that Red Sox fans are far more problematic and pathetic than Yankees fans. You want self-loathing? Red Sox fans (Todd, this refers to you when you are wearing The Hat) live to lose. They prop themselves up with tragedy narratives, giving inflated importance to their story. They are the exact inverse, and therefore the precise reflection, of the Yankees fan who claims victory before the first pitch is thrown, in order to magnify the glory of the win or the shock of the loss. This does not describe every Yankees fan, but Red Sox Nation knows no dissent. I’ve never met a reasonable Sox fan. I won’t say more because it’s like whipping a masochist. I’d like to think that a third-party fan such as yourself, Dan, wouldn’t buy into their puppet show.
I’ll also say this, just to end my anti-Yankees/Yankees fans post on a note to piss everyone off: does anyone notice how quiet Mets fans are when their team is losing? Say what you will about the Yankees, I genuinely believe that the fans are damn good at supporting the team. Certainly better than the Mets fans, who cheer only AFTER things have gone well. How do you not cheer when you have bases loaded and one of your best hitters at the plate? Everyone was already crying! No wonder he took strike three.
— Judd Oct 19, 10:02pm #
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