• Featured |
  • Burton DeWitt
  • Vin Diec
  • Trevor Freeman
  • Diane Grassi
  • Gabe Kahn
  • Ryan McGowan
  • Kris Pollina
  • Matt Waters
  • Ray Yocke
  • -----------
  • Write for SC
  • Get Featured
  • Nominate
• blog |
• Journals

• NFL
• NBA
• MLB
• NHL
• College
• Other

• forums + |
  • Chat Room
  • Message Boards
  • Philly Message Boards
  • Photo Pool
• Submit |
• Help

I Almost Bought a Yankee Hat

By BostonMac, Section MLB
Posted on Sun Oct 17 2004 at 9:01 PM EST
More on: (all tags)

By Ryan McGowan

I almost did it.  I almost bought a Yankee hat.

I was driving from Boston to North Attleboro on Sunday for my dad's birthday and stopped at the Walpole Mall, knowing full well that the closer I got to Foxboro, the more chance I had of accidentally driving into a state trooper setting out orange cones for traffic control, which would not be a good thing.  I wanted to get my dad a book at Barnes and Noble.  Hey, I`ve only bought him about 20 books over the years, approximately 5% of which he's actually read.  Still, I figure I can get away with buying him books because at least I can read them when I come visit.

Yankee hats.

It was fascinating, to stand there and actually contemplate buying a Yankee hat, which is something I'd never even thought of doing before.  It was strangely cathartic.  The Yankee hat is very simple, with almost no pizzazz or fanfare: just the traditional, familiar, interlocking "NY" and the solid dark blue, somehow darker than the blue in a Red Sox hat.  And I thought to myself, Why not?  Why not switch and become a Yankee fan?

I don't think I ever seriously considered the notion, but it appealed to me as an intellectual question, kind of like one of those Brain Teasers you can buy in a CVS magazine rack.  I tried to rationalize it.  I figured that if you remove the emotional, traditional factors involved (the whole "my father was a Sox fan, his father was a Sox fan, his mother's secret lover was a Sox fan" angle), and look at it purely from a rational perspective, it's a no-brainer.  In that world, we would all be Yankee fans.

Say you have two teams from which to choose whom to root for.  One always wins.  The other always loses, to the point where it's basically a joke to even think of referring to their meetings as a "rivalry."  From a rational standpoint, why would someone ever choose to put their allegiance and spend their time with the team that always lost?  Sox games would start resembling Le Stade Olympique in the latter years of Les Expos.  There would be a mass exodus from the Sox bandwagon to the Yankee gravy train.  

Fortunately, life doesn't exist purely in a rational vacuum.  I didn't really want to buy the Yankee hat, as much as I wish I rooted for a winner, like my NFL team is.  I have watched the Sox as long as I can remember, to the point where I can recall going to my first game on Opening Day in 1983 to see Carl Yastrzsemski in his last season with the team.  I have never held any sort of allegiance to any other team, except for a brief flirtation with the expansion Colorado Rockies in their first season of 1993.  So switching to the Yankees is unthinkable, because unlike most Yankee fans, I happen to have a soul.

I read an article in the Boston Globe after Game 2 last week, in which the writer told a story of being at that tough loss in the Bronx and bravely wearing his Red Sox hat in enemy territory.  He started talking to a guy wearing a Yankee hat, who told him he understood his pain.  Apparently this guy had a young son, and he was a Mets fan before the son was born.  After the 2000 World Series, he switched to the Yankees, because he didn't want to make it harder on his son.  He wanted his son to grow up feeling like a winner.

I was hesitant at first to write a frustrated, sappy column about the Sox, knowing full well that 95% of the other articles this week would probably be of a similar vein.  And I hate to sound like a whining fan, because that's not my intention.  But over the years I've watched the average Yankee fans, and how they act, and interact with others.  I've watched when Fox has cut to shots of 40-50-year-old women wearing pink NY caps, with a look of delight in their eyes because the events on the field are thankfully supporting their big-shot feelings of self-importance and superiority.  And it's so pathetic.  

Red Sox fans may be pathetic when we chant, "Yankees Suck" or other asinine mantras, but the millions of soulless Yankee fans who use the games on the field to validate their own sad, self-absorbed existences are even more despicable.  I have no problem with the Yankee fan who knows baseball, understands the ins and outs of the game, and most of all has an appreciation for the accomplishments that his favorite team has been fortunate to accumulate over the years.  Such a fan is rare, but they do exist.  I have even met some of them in person, and they tend to be the literate ones who actually finished high school and may have even attended college.  

What drives me and millions of other Sox fans insane are the legions of fair-weather Yankee fans who follow the team to validate their own sad existence.  They love to watch other fans' disappointment.  They seem to take more pleasure in the other team losing than they appreciate their own team winning.  I can't really blame them; it's hard to appreciate something that happens so often it becomes automatic.  It's still possible, though, to appreciate a morning sunrise, even though it happens every day.  I don't think it's asking too much to expect Yankee fans to have an appreciation for their team.  Too many of them take winning for granted, and their hubris is constantly backed up by the incessant winning of their team.  It seems to lead to a vicious cycle which has robbed the average Yankee fan of their soul.

Again, I hate to sound like a whiny Red Sox fan, but I refuse to give in to what Yankee fans would want me to believe about myself: that I am a loser, simply because the team I root for hasn't won a World Series since 1918.  That is what the "1918" chant is really about: the Yankee fans are reminding us that we deserve to feel like losers because of the fortunes of our team.  Millions of baseball-loving devotees, an entire region, are expected to adopt the self-image of a loser because of the Red Sox.  And by reminding us that we are failures, they are trying to cast a divide between us and them.  They are winners because they root for the Yankees, we are losers because we root for the Red Sox.  And I don't buy it.

At the risk of getting more sappy, Tom Hanks' character in A League of Their Own (a very underrated movie, by the way) has this to say about the game:  "Baseball is what gets inside you.  It's what lights you up.  You can't deny that."  He is right.  It's the game that is great, not the individual teams.  The Yankees are not bigger than the game itself.  I have loved baseball my entire life, played it all through high school and continue to hold on to the game by playing in softball leagues today.  Throughout all that time I have rooted for my hometown franchise, yet I am supposed to feel like a loser because of the World Series record of that team?  This is what makes Yankee fans soulless: they want us to feel this way, because that will make them feel better about themselves.  Nice people, these guys.

In the movie, Hanks also says, "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great."  The difficulty of winning the World Series won't be lost on Sox fans when we finally do win one again.  It is lost entirely on Yankee fans who treat winning as their birthright and don't show an ounce of appreciation for it.  They see it as a predestined outcome and a result of their status as the "winners" in life.  And they want us to feel bad about loving the game, and want us to submit to our daddies as certified, card-carrying losers.  (Not to mention the stereotypes and cliché storylines played out by a lazy national media who characterizes us as yahoos and some sort of cartoon caricature.)

I tip my cap to the Yankees; they are a fine team, a collection of talented professionals who have a knack for performing in the clutch and winning.  They are a lot like the current edition of the Patriots.  But I have no respect for their average fan who can't even have a rational discussion about baseball because of their unalterable arrogance.  Sadly, that seems to be a rather large percentage of Yankee Nation: a front-running sycophant who needs to put down others to feel better about themselves.  Very sad.

I would expect to get e-mails from Yankee fans just accusing me of being another whiny, loser Red Sox fan who can't accept the reality that the Yankees will always win and the Red Sox will always lose.  To me, baseball isn't about the record of the teams.  I would rather root for the Red Sox and hold onto my soul and core, than sell out just so I can get a cheap, fraudulent, vicarious thrill of feeling like a "winner."  

So, I put the Yankee hat back on its shelf.  I quietly asked for forgiveness from God (a known Red Sox fan; read the Book of Job in the Old Testament if you need confirmation) for such near-blasphemy.  Maybe I'm crazy for staying with the Sox, but would you rather join in with 55,000 other arrogant fleabags in chanting "1918" or have your inner humanity intact?  I realized that choosing a team, for Sox fans, isn't about rationality.  It's not about popularity.  It's certainly not about winning and losing.  

What it IS about, is loving a sport and a team so much that you are driven to write 2,000 word mini-dissertations about them on a Sunday night in Boston.  It's about loyalty and fidelity through every situation imaginable.  It's about being let down time and time again by a team you give your heart to.  No other sport requires the sheer intensity of the day-in and day-out emotional roller-coaster that baseball does.  It's easy to be a football fan.  You set aside three hours on Sunday afternoon to watch the game.  But a baseball season is a six-month odyssey, and watching the end of it is similar to what happens when you finish a good book: you don't want it to end, but it can't go on forever.  The only trouble with the Red Sox is that the ending of each chapter always seems to be the same.  Hey, at least it's a good story... with plenty of heart and soul.

Call me crazy, call me an idealist, call me overweight - all are true.  But don't ever call me a Yankee fan.