“One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in “The Web and the Rock.” That was certainly true for me, a small-town boy from the New England side of Connecticut, due northeast of the line dividing the Red Sox and Yankees halves of the state.
I’ve now lived in New York for nearly 50 years, and I cling to the city like a lifeline. I’ve dedicated a book to this place, thanking it for giving me a home. Even now, as friends weigh ways to flee from the Trump administration, dusting off the former citizenships of their forebears (even to places they fled) or plotting escapes to Costa Rica or Canada, I’ve only dug in. I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
But those feelings of belonging go only so far, and vanish when it comes to the Yankees. Watching their fans watch them play, I recognize all those obnoxious stereotypes of New Yorkers which, in every other context, I’m the first to resist — of arrogance, rudeness, impatience, omniscience. These New Yorkers think they’re better than everyone else, more entitled than everyone else and more immune to life’s indignities than everyone else — like losing a ballgame. So I celebrate whenever that happens — as it did on Wednesday night, when the Yankees fell 5-to-2 in the American League division series to the Toronto Blue Jays, ending their season.
It was a different game that exemplified the entitled attitude of Yankees fans for me. In early September I went to Yankee Stadium with my pal Howard, who, because he’s from Detroit, bears a chip on his shoulder about the Yankees nearly as monumental as mine. The Yankees melted down just wonderfully that night, yielding nine runs in the seventh inning in a spectacular display of ineptitude — and we just ate it up.
The fan reaction that night followed a familiar pattern. The cheering quickly stopped and the booing began, reaching a crescendo when the much maligned manager Aaron Boone dared to emerge from the dugout. And then came the ultimate protest of Yankees fans: thousands of them streaming — storming — out early, leaving the joint to people like Howard and me, those New Yorkers by choice Thomas Wolfe wrote about, people from Baltimore and Chicago and Boston and elsewhere who’d shed their hometowns but never their baseball loyalties. In my mind, we were multitudes. And we basked.
Unsurprisingly, such feelings only intensify for me when the Yankees play the Red Sox, especially in the postseason, as they did this year. When that happens, I devolve, like a Rod Serling character, from a semi-sophisticated, aging Upper West Sider to a hick kid in the wilds of rural northeastern Connecticut between Worcester, Mass., and Providence, R.I. Just like that, I’m back in a time when the Red Sox still hadn’t won a World Series since 1918; the Yankees were still U.S. Steel; and my big brother was still a Yankees fan, his Mickey Mantle mitt still over his left hand. So the psychological stakes were high.
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