Yankees Suck!
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Jamey Newburg, creator of the excellent newburgreport. com Rangers website, expressed the inner feelings of Rangers fans toward the Yankees: “The Rangers had never been a playoff team from 1972 until they played the Yanks in 1996, when we won Game 1 in New York, then lost nine straight. We felt like, ”We’ve finally moved out of 25 years of piss-poor baseball, but we couldn’t get a series against anybody but the Yankees, who have such a bigger payroll. There was also a sense that the Yankees weren’t concerned about us, that they were always looking ahead to Boston or the World Series. They were the big bad villain.”
SEATTLE
In 2001, the Mariners broke the American League record for wins with 116 (trumping the 1998 Yankees’ 114), but the Yanks doused their pixie dust by thrashing them four games to one in the League Championship Series.
NATIONAL LEAGUE IMPRESSIONS
ARIZONA (PHOENIX)
After the 2001 season, in which the Diamondbacks had finally ended the Yankees Dynasty, their owner, Jerry Colangelo, came to a handshake agreement with David Wells, only to have George the Bully swoop down and sign him away from Arizona. This may have been George’s revenge for Colangelo’s playing “New York, New York” repeatedly after Arizona blasted the Yankees in Game 6 in Arizona. Colangelo said at the time, “I heard it over and over and over in Yankee Stadium, and if they can’t take a little fun, then the hell with them.”
WASHINGTON
With a new team in tow, albeit in the National League, the D.C. fans can rekindle a hatred of the Yankees that reached its creative apex with Douglas Wallop’s book The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant and its musical adaptation, Damn Yankees (in which loyal Senators fan Joe Hardy goes all Faust just to help his team beat the Yanks).
NEW YORK: QUEENS
The Mets came into existence a laughing stock during the waning years of the Yankee dynasty. Many of their fans were residual Dodger and Giant followers, and the memory of so many defeats at the hands of the Yankees was still fresh. In their first three years, they finished last while the Yanks won the pennant and in 1962 the World Series, yet the Mets regularly outdrew their crosstown rivals, posting better attendance numbers in 12 of their first 14 seasons. In fact, it wasn’t until the beginning of the last Yankee dynasty that the Yankees finally caught up to the Mets in annual attendance. From the Mets’ inception through the strike-shortened 1994 season, more New Yorkers made their way to Flushing than to the Bronx in 21 of 33 seasons.
Of course, that provides little comfort to Mets fans, who watched in horror as Armando Benitez blew the save in Game 1 of the 2000 World Series against the Yanks, on the road to an eventual Series loss. The Mets haven’t fared any better in the regular season, having split or lost every series matchup between the two teams since the beginning of interleague play through 2003. While a three-game sweep at Shea in 2004 did manage to clinch the season series and make it safe for New York’s National League fan base to wear their team’s cap on the subways, it was still only a drop in the bucket. Boston fans may hate their Yankee counterparts, but at least they get to go home to their own; Mets fans have to live with the enemy and bear his noxious presence on a daily basis. How do Mets fan really feel about the Yankees? One fan wrote on a website, “Steinbrenner eats babies.”
NEW YORK: MANHATTAN
The New York Giants shared their home on Hilltop Park, called the Polo Grounds, with the fledgling Yankees from 1913 to 1922, at the end of which time the Ruthian Bombers outdrew the Giants and went on to dethrone them as the city’s favorite team. Oh, and they also beat them in five straight World Series from 1923 to 1951, and a sixth if you count their win over the San Francisco Giants in 1962.
NEW YORK: BROOKLYN
“Dem Bums,” as the Dodgers were known for decades, suffered ignominy while the Yanks were erecting a mythic presence in baseball’s Golden Age. To the Dodgers’ working-class, immigrant fans, the Yankees were a combination of Hitler and Big Capital. In the 1941 World Series, Dodger catcher Mickey Owens’s passed ball on a third strike to Tommy Henrich kept the Yanks alive long enough for them to win the game and the Series. After the war, Dodger fans watched while Casey Stengel, considered a hapless loser when he’d helmed the Dodgers, took over the reins in the Bronx and lead the Yanks to an unequaled championship run that included 1947,1949,1951,1952,1953, and 1956 World Series wins over the Dodgers.
NOTES
1 This chapter is based on material from baseballlibrary. com, Total Baseball, BaseballProspectus.com, and responses to author’s queries through online chat rooms of fan sites.
2 E-mail exchange with the author, 2004.
Firable Offenses
Worst (sub .500) Yankee Regular-Season Performances
Worth Apologizing Over...
Worst Yankee Postseason Performances Ever
a Opening Day payrolls; all others are September 1 totals.
b Yankee security once confiscated from me a small cardboard box of fruit juice ... this while selling more alcohol than Ernest and Julio Gallo.