“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, 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.
The morning after the Sox humiliated the Yankees in the magnificent first game of this year’s wild card series, I plopped down two bucks for The New York Post, a paper I don’t normally read, to savor the orgy of indignation and second-guessing plastered predictably over its back page. Reading it was almost as good as watching Aroldis Chapman mow down the Bombers with the bases loaded and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth.
Of course it all went downhill from there, and for old-time Red Sox fans like me, that came as absolutely no surprise. To us, the deciding game was over before the first pitch. The burden then passed to the Blue Jays.
I tried pulling for the Yankees against the Blue Jays; honest, I did. There were even some inducements: By extending my baseball season — I’ve no stake, pro or con, in any other team — the Yankees could fend off the bleak months to come, with their long nights, Arctic blasts and all that ugly, inescapable football for a few more weeks. Maybe a few of Hal Steinbrenner’s dollars would trickle down to my fragile, beleaguered city. I also thought momentarily of all those otherwise perfectly lovely people I know who actually like the Yankees, some of them quite passionately. (As my mother is always telling us, you have to “make allowances.”) But antipathies aren’t so easily shed.
The Blue Jays performed brilliantly, putting the Yankees back on the brink after two embarrassingly lopsided wins. That brought return trips to the newsstand, to find The Post’s sportswriters scouring for synonyms for “lousy” and “pathetic.” But in the third game the Jays morphed into the Red Sox, handing over a win with a couple of bush league errors. In so doing, they confirmed something I learned in the 1962 World Series, which ended when Willie McCovey’s scorching line drive went straight into Bobby Richardson’s glove: The Yankees are not just richer than everyone else, but luckier. (Additional confirmation: Aaron Judge’s home run off the left-field foul pole.)
Wednesday night, even after the Blue Jays had padded their lead, I remained uneasy. By the eighth inning — shortly after merciless Yankees fans brutally rode Anthony Volpe over his latest strikeout, a harbinger of the bloodletting to come — the announcers were already offering their postmortems for the Yankees, but I awaited catastrophe. Looking at the pinstripes, I still saw Mantle and Roger Maris rather than Trent Grisham and Austin Wells. Then, suddenly, Cody Bellinger swung and missed — and it was over.
Sixteen years have passed since the Yankees were last world champs. So sad! While “2009!” may not yet have the same ring as “1918!” — the taunt Yankees fans once threw at Red Sox fans — give it some time, like a few more decades, and maybe it will. In the meantime, before enraged, marauding Yankees fans pick the newsstands clean, can someone kindly save me a copy of Thursday’s New York Post?
David Margolick is a former reporter for The Times and the author of several books, including the forthcoming “When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post I Love Watching Yankees Fans Suffer appeared first on New York Times.
