The Team America Loves to Hate: Why Baseball Fans Despise the New York Yankees
In the summer of 2006, as I was driving back home to Northeastern Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh, I began the mental recap of the weekend that had just transpired. It was the annual baseball weekend, a get-together with a few guys I went to graduate school with who can still stand to be in my company for a few days at a time. There's the requisite catching up on each other's lives, reminiscences about the old days, bad jokes, a few beers, and, of course, a couple of baseball games, which provide the excuse for all of this. The location is determined through a fairly simple geographical calculus; with the participants residing in Michigan, Cleveland, Columbus, and Northeastern Pennsylvania, the equalization of driving time toward a central location is one of the goals. If Major League Baseball is to be part of the mix, our destination is often a group of seats at an Indians weekend series. This tends to sit well with this crowd, as three of the four grew up in the Cleveland area as loyal Indians fans and remain so to this day (the fourth participant, a Cincinnati Reds fan, somehow manages to endure the indignity of hanging with us, mainly out of respect for the institution of majority rule). But even the most ardent Indians fan yearns to see how the other half roots, to experience a familiar ritual in a new context, and a quick glance at the road atlas yields an obvious conclusion: Pittsburgh is a no-brainer.
However, Pittsburgh's geographic centrality was only one plus among several resulting in this choice. First, the Pirates represented a neutral fan focus for the members of our group; in other words, none of us really cared if they won or lost. This portended less arguing about baseball and more time for beer. Second, the 2006 Pirates were a team with little hope of on-field success, which tends to make ticket availability a non-issue, and modest attendance tends to enhance the availability of stadium vendors which, in turn, enhances the availability of beer. Third, none of us had attended a game at PNC Park, an intimate gem of a stadium opened in 2001, which had quickly developed a reputation for not having a bad seat in the house. Finally, the weekend of our gathering featured a series pitting the Pirates against the San Francisco Giants, a team that featured one Barry Bonds, an outfielder who once played in Pittsburgh, before the allure of big-market money led him away from this small-market franchise. Seeing how his former fans reacted to his return to where it all began provided an irresistible sidebar to the game itself, supplying sufficient content for discussion to justify yet another round of beers.
While baseball fans tend to focus their attention on a particular team, the fact that those teams are comprised of individual players cannot be ignored. Fans are individual human beings, and individual players provide an opportunity for fans to form intimate, one-to-one relationships. Sure, these relationships are rooted in fantasy. But what aspect of fandom isn't, and what fan fantasizes about what it would be like to actually be an entire team? A kid dreams of emulating the on-field performance of his favorite player, not the general style of play that characterizes his team of choice. After all, a team's style of play is largely determined by a team's manager, who attempts to get the most out of the roster given to him. Perhaps some kids dream of manipulating on-field talent (a dream that seems to find increasingly frequent expression as baseball simulation games and fantasy leagues proliferate), but I would think that more of them dream of actually playing the game. It's the difference between being the hero who wins it with a walk-off homer and the middle management bureaucrat who sits in the dugout worrying and wondering if others can get the job done. Kids play. Players play. And when kids grow up to be adult fans of the game, it is the player on the field that reminds them of what that used to be like.
So, when a player leaves your team -- a player around whom you've constructed one of those intimate, one-to-one relationships, fueled by fantasy and remembrance of a youth when any heroic exploit was still possible? -- you take it personally. If that player happens to leave your team for the Yankees, the sting of that loss is amplified in ways that this book can only begin to articulate. Of course, players leave teams for any number of reasons and under a variety of circumstances, and who better than the scorned fan to articulate the acute pain of losing a favorite player? -- for any reason, under any circumstances? -- to the New York Yankees.
Originally, my intentions for addressing the Yankees organization and Major League Baseball as inducements for Yankee hatred involved the writing of two separate chapters. But as I studied the comments of fans focused on these two topics, it became apparent that separating them would represent something of a false distinction. For some fans, complaints about one of these entities necessarily invoke the other as an accomplice, as if collusion and conspiracy were unavoidable characteristics of their relationship to one another. For others, that relationship is seen as less symbiotic than compensatory, where an inability on the part of Major League Baseball to exert authority creates a vacuum that the Yankees organization aggressively fills to its own advantage. In either case, it is clear that baseball fans perceive the Yankees and Major League Baseball as inseparable parts of a system; a two-headed monster which, according to the final balance sheet, produces various strains of enmity within the fanbases of those other 29 teams.
In the spring of 1990, I was working as a temporary, untenured member of the faculty on which I now serve as a fully promoted and tenured professor. In terms of the daily routine, the difference between these two positions is barely noticeable. In each case, one goes to work, teaches classes, attends meetings, grades papers, and tries to generate a program of scholarship that demonstrates an expertise capable of ensuring future employment. Perhaps the biggest difference could be best described in terms of security; not just the job security that comes with tenure and results in few worries of a pink slip showing up on your desk any given Monday morning, but also the collegial security that comes from acceptance by one's peers as an intellectually and culturally worthy member of the academy. Back in my temporary, untenured days, I was always on the lookout for opportunities to cultivate that sort of acceptance. I chose to pass on some of them, especially when it seemed that my efforts were likely to result in an embarrassing faux pas, exposing me as the unsophisticated Philistine I always feared I was. But when one of my colleagues invited me to a party celebrating the completion of his doctoral degree, I saw it as a fairly safe suck-up opportunity.
Everyone from work would be there, even some of our students. So, that uncomfortable feeling of being in a room with no one familiar to talk to would not be a concern. Also, it was a party, where drinks would be served, and where some would be served too many. So, there was a good chance that I would not be the only person likely to do something stupid during the course of the evening. Add to this the fact that not going would clearly be a snub to a guy who had been nothing but helpful and friendly to me, and the decision to go became a real no-brainer. The event was being hosted by a good friend of his who, by virtue of a combination of rent control and trust fund checks, lived in an apartment in midtown Manhattan that was spacious enough to accommodate the festivities. So, I began the 75-mile drive to New York City with a relatively carefree attitude, my main concern being the location of an appropriate parking space.
I had a great time that evening for several reasons, not the least of which was meeting a young woman who found me inoffensive enough to approach and actually speak to me. Being free, single, and suitably immature at the time, I jumped at the chance to reciprocate her attention, and by the end of the evening, I had a phone number prefaced by a New York City area code scribbled on a matchbook in my shirt pocket. Driving back to Pennsylvania that night, I felt as if I had met the city on its own terms and came away victorious, in possession of a trophy that would serve as my return ticket to even greater adventures in urban excitement. After allowing an appropriate period of time to pass in order to avoid the appearance of being pathetically anxious, I dialed the number with the intent of making a date. We agreed to make our second meeting a relatively casual and unstructured day in New York, during which we would just go with the flow and get to know one another better. Of course, it's that part about getting to know one another better where it all goes to hell in a handbasket. Sure, things started out just fine; we scored a couple tickets for Free Shakespeare in the Park, got caught in the rain, bought matching sweatshirts to replace our soaked clothes, took some photos, and had some laughs. Then, we got to know one another better. "Your boyfriend got busted for what?" "How long is his jail sentence?""You really think you can afford this apartment working as a sign language interpreter for music videos?" It's not that any of this would completely disqualify her as a fine and upstanding human being worthy of my time and attention. But of all the weird variables and mixed messages I received that day, there's one thing that stands out as the deal-breaker.
We've examined the phenomenon of Yankee hatred from a variety of perspectives: animosity grounded in fans' perceptions of players associated with the Yankees, the notion that the Yankees and Major League Baseball constitute an alliance that produces systemic unfairness, the perceived attitude of Yankee fans and New Yorkers in general, and an assortment of complaints numerous and diverse enough to warrant the catch-all category found in the last chapter. In all cases, comments drawn from fan narratives have provided ample evidence that these are active concerns in the lives of a broad spectrum of baseball fans representing every team fanbase in Major League Baseball. While characterized by a high degree of honesty, humor, and passion, these narratives cannot fully account for the origins of Yankee hatred, nor can they fully explain how it functions, or what purpose it serves, in the lives of those fans. So ingrained in their subjective fan experience is the phenomenon of Yankee hatred that a sufficiently objective consideration of these issues simply might not be available to them. Though I, too, am a baseball fan in whom a healthy degree of Yankee hatred has taken root, it now falls upon me to attempt to step outside my fandom in order to assess the origin, function, and purpose of that hatred. To assist me in this unlikely task, I will enlist the wisdom of others who have dedicated their intellectual lives to understanding fandom, but are likely to do so from a position of greater distance from off-season concerns about filling that hole at third base or the nail-biting anxiety that accompanies a late-season push for the playoffs.
Despite all the flattering talk emanating from team spokespeople about providing a first-class fan experience for first-class fans, it's difficult to think of the main motive for building a new Yankee Stadium as anything other than a desire to enhance an already prodigious Yankee revenue stream.