This is baseball. I don’t have to be logical. My team is subject to my derision as well as my support. I am large, I contain multitudes.
In the meantime, where is that power-hitter we were promised?
That was a good and fair answer. Most of it true, except that apparently you are younger than I thought.
I missed the glory years of Yanks, born too late, I started as a Yankee fan, putting up with the Mets fans of the early 70s, when you could get great seats to the Stadium because the Bronx was too scary and fans too fickle. Then came the Bronx Zoo years. That was really fun; the team won, fought, fought the Red Sox, fought the Orioles and Earl Weaver and especially fought each other. Crazy years. Then I had to live through the incompetent Boss years of the Eighties. This is the time period that the Dolans emulate so well today. The Yanks were a joke in the late 80s and early 90s. Then came Jeter and Mo and Pettitte and Posada and the second coming of Lou Pinella in the form of Paul O’Neill and the new glory days. So, yes it has been great for the last 13 seasons, but before that the ride was not so great.
You know what your team did in the early 90s with overpriced, free agents screwing up the team, well the was a 10 year stretch for the Yanks in the Eighties.
As far as Giambi and Damon, hell George wanted them and Johnson, Sheffield and even Clemens. Yankee fans did not.
I think Moose is a little different; he escaped a bad team with a bad owner that was not improving. He also escaped a terrible Pitcher’s park. You might want to cut him a little slack. He got the Yanks, Mets and Red Sox into a bidding war and chose the team he thought would win the WS. It might not be noble, but it is hard to fault him.
Jim
It’s not so much the fact that Yankees fans outnumber Mets fans by about 2:1 overall in the NYC metro area; I could live with that. (Though it does gall me that my own neighborhood of Flushing, the home of the Mets, feels like it’s around 50/50 Yankees fans due to all the Italians in the neighborhood, and apparently Italian New Yorkers are traditionally inclined to be Yankee fans since the days of DiMaggio.)
And it’s not the franchise’s storied history; any New Yorker, deep down, should feel that if there’s gonna be a Most Successful Sports Franchise In History, particularly a baseball team, it sure as hell should be from New York City.
It’s the ubiquitousness, sense of entitlement and occasional arrogance on display by certain Yankee fans that is infuriating. So rooting for the Yankees to fail is really out of a sense of wanting to see those types of jerks shut up (which of course they won’t for long, but even a day’s worth of silence is worth wishing for). The fact that sometimes these so-called jerks are one’s closest friends, relatives or neighbors simply adds to it.
For example, at just about every Mets home game at Shea, there are people showing up in Yankees attire to non-interleague games, and who at some point (particularly if the Mets are losing badly, or if the scoreboard shows a Yankees rally going on in their game), attempt to start a “Let’s Go Yankees” chant going. That’s the usual reason for hearing “Yankees Suck” chants at Shea. Not just to taunt some schmo wearing a Yankees hat 'cause that’s his team, and he came to the Mets game with a friend. (Though that does happen too, but on a less wide scale.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, as it’s been a fairly long while since I’ve been to Yankee Stadium but I doubt there are many Mets fans showing up doing the same there.
And then there’s the Smug Factor, the pervading sense of entitlement that comes from the very top and filters down through the fan base. I rooted for the underdog Yanks in '96; in fact, it was the '96 Yanks that rekindled my interest in MLB (ironically, I did not follow the Mets through the 80s). But I quickly switched to rooting for the Mets because of the “generally accepted principle” among the fan base that the Yankees “are supposed to win”, and how those Yankees (populated with homegrown talent) represented not just an exciting era of baseball, but “a return to normalcy” if you will.
Follow this up with the increasingly large number of standard deviations the Yankees payroll is from the league norm thrown at free agents, and all this talk about how “unacceptable” the Yankees are for not having won a World Series in seven years, that people’s jobs are on the line over it? Puh-leeze. It has all the feel of rooting for a hedge fund to hit performance fee incentives. Sure it matters if you’re invested in it, otherwise, the only good theater to come out of it is to see a spectacular crash and burn.
In short – it’s easy to take the attitude of “just ignore the other team” when they’re not in your face all the time. Picture if you will that over the next 10-15 years, the Yanks drop into the cellar despite a top-five payroll, except for one WS appearance where they are beaten by their cross-town rivals at home, with the stadium half full of fans of the visiting team, while the Mets win 5 or 6 pennants and a 4 championships, so that every time you visit Yankee Stadium you see Mets fans even when they’re not on the field, and every other baseball cap you see on Arthur Ave. is a Mets cap. Admit it, you would find yourself cheering just a little bit for the Atlanta Braves or something. It’s only human.
And yeah – I’m totally with you on the Dolans. I used to be a HUGE Knicks fan. The Dolans have killed that for me.
Apparently nearly as much time as you’ve got, as I spent a bit of time writing my essay on Why This Mets Fan Roots Against The Yankees to complement yours in roughly the same span 
Yep, and I know several Yankee fans who feel the same way (and include even successful players like Roger Clemens and A-Rod in the mix): they root for them to do well, being as they’re on the team, but do not consider them “real Yankees”.
I don’t see how people root for Giambi in particular. Two years ago when the Giants came to Shea while Bonds was on the cusp of breaking Ruth’s HR record, there was a mini-flood of Yankee fans coming to the game wearing Ruth jerseys and carrying signs and banners about how Ruth “did it clean”. And while I approved of such gestures, I found it amusing that two or three young men, who sat in the row right in front of me, unfurled a large banner (that made it onto national TV) over the rail reading “THE BABE DID IT ON HOT DOGS AND BEER”, missed the irony inherent in two of them wearing not Babe Ruth but Jason Giambi jerseys.
The Italian thing, as far as I know, as an Italian-American, it goes all the way back to Poosh-em-up Lazzari. Italians started loving the Yanks then and then Joe form the triumverate of great and respected Yankees with Sinatra and Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia. Additionally, Italians decide the Bambino must really be Italian, (I heard Blacks had also decided he was part Black, apparently many ethnic groups wanted to adopt Babe Ruth). Then in addition to the DiMaggio, there was Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzutto. This helped make me a third generation Yankee fan. Both my grandfathers started watching baseball because of Lazzari and were cemented forever to the Yanks because of DiMaggio.
At least we can agree on the Dolans. 
I thought overall the Island was Met Territory, I know Jersey is 2:1 for the Yanks and Manhattan, Westchester & the Bronx are overwhelmingly Yankees. Is it just the Italian neighborhoods where the Ratio comes even in Queens and Brooklyn?
Jim
I’m turning 30 this year. I started watching baseball with my dad in 1985, the year I turned 8, when the Mets were fighting the Cardinals and Doc, Darryl, and Mex were in town and at their best. The Yankees were off the radar then. My second year as a baseball fan, the Mets won the World Series; five years later, Gooden, Strawberry, and Hernandez were various kinds of washed up. Since then it’s been a ride not unlike that of every other team - Bobby Bonilla and Rico Brogna on the one hand, and the Bobby Valentine Mets of the late 90’s that almost, almost beat the Yankees.
And you know, in all fairness, I rooted for the Yankees against the Braves in the World Series (I don’t really hate the Yankees; I root against them. I hate the Braves, and would rather a combo platter of Giambi, Damon, and Mussina then one serving of that smug putz Larry Jones).
But I’ve left the most important reason for rooting against the Yankees. In 1995 or so, my dad, who had been a Met fan for my entire memory, switched sides. Yes, that’s right, my own father went over to the other camp, and within two or three years had become one of those Yankee fans who never stops crowing. My own flesh and blood. What could that mean but war?
I think this is a fair assessment. There’s no lack of Italian Mets fans in the area, but I would say most of the Yankee fans are Italian, and there sure are a lot of them.
Yankee fans tend to be more “loud” about their allegiance, too. Part of it is because they have something to shout about, of course, but you see a lot of Yankee-logo full-rear-window decals, flags flying from windows, etc., gold chains with the Yankees logo hanging off of it, etc., and not so much that type of thing for Mets stuff. I consider myself a pretty big fan – I follow just about every game on TV or radio, falling asleep to the West Coast ones, at least until they’re mathematically eliminated from the playoffs (it may be hard for a Yankee fan to remember but it is something that can happen to a team ;)), and head to the stadium 15 times a year with a weekend ticket plan – but I don’t have anything so, well, so gauche as that going on. (Let’s not even talk about how the Yankees logo has been co-opted into standard issue uniform for Hip-Hop Gangsta wannabes.)
It’s also worth noting that a majority of NY Metro people are casual fans who support both teams, with a current preference for one or the other for whatever reason. Which if one stops to think about it, is really only sensible – it’s just us, well, fanatics that feel compelled to draw such lines in the sand.
Getting back to the forecasting, I did want to point out one thing I saw a couple of Sundays ago, when the Yankees and Red Sox played the national TV game. Boston fans might not want to get too comfortable, because while Matsusaka has been good so far, New York hit him pretty hard in that game. They did not look intimidated by him at all. And that was the first time they were seeing “the legend.” It was overshadowed by the four straight home runs the Red Sox hit, and not much attention was paid to it, but the archrival looked pretty comfortable against Boston’s latest savior. That could have a big impact down the road.
And thanks, storyteller, for saying something I’ve always thought: I think a lot less of a player who gets beaten by another team, then turns around and joins that team, usually with some line about “wanting to win a championship.” Hey, asshole, if you’re such a good player, one who deserves a championship, let’s see you win it with your team, not riding on the coattails of the team that was already there. That’s always bothered me. In some cases I think it’s downright cowardly. Stand up and fight for it; don’t just slink away and then show up in the rearguard of the other side.
I’m not sure I’d even say Matsusaka has been good so far. He took a nice pasting last night to go with the Yankees decidedly unimpressed treatment of him; those 10 strikeouts against Kansas City the first week of April are getting further and further into the past.
Exactly.
Before yesterday’s game my beloved Brewers had the best record in baseball and had just swept the World Series Champs.
I am hopeful they will make the playoffs, 1983 was a long time ago.
I am fairly sure that the Indians are off to a good start because they began their season at Miller Park and some of our luck rubbed off on them.
Maybe you can fill me in: are Bud Selig’s dirty hands now completely off the Brewers, or is he still part of the ownership? I’d feel much better about rooting for them if I knew he no longer had any official tie to the franchise.
The Milwaukee Brewers, just like the Milwaukee breweries, are 100% Bud-free.
The Brewers are owned by a likable fellow named Mark Attanasio now.
I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’ve been rooting for the Brewers ever since the Indians (my team) played those games at Miller Park.
Why am I sorry? Because my rooting powers tend to destroy teams. I apologize in advance.
But I needed an NL team! It’s not my fault!
Just in case there’s any further question why the rest of the baseball world hates the Yankees:
Here’s hoping the Rocket gets lit up like a searchlight.
The Clemens news chagned the complexion of my Sunday, that’s for sure.
'Cause they’ll use any excuse they can?
Well, when the Yankees keep giving us reasons…
Here’s to the Yankees finishing in last place, especially with Clemens in tow.
Yeah, they did what the Astros did the last two years. Damn them!
What, sign Clemens?
Nah, it’s more than just that, dear** Marley**.
It was inevitable. Even with some of you Yankee fans (ask What Exit?!), you expected Clemens in pinstripes. Now, part of that is the knowledge that comes with having the resources to go out and do whatever you have to do to fix a roster/rotation problem.
Meh. Again, if I could raise petitions or money to ensure the Yankees would go 0-162 for every year until the day I die, I’d spend a lot of time doing it.
We knew Clemens would be in Pinstripes because his best friend is a Yankee, we had the money and we knew Pavano was not going to do anything for us this year. However, this will hardly make anyone hate the Yanks any more than they already did, so why sweat that part.
It was a big pick-me-up for the Team from what I could tell and I am sure the Red Sox and their fans are disappointed that the Yanks got him and have moved from last to second in less than a week.
Did anyone really believe he would be a Red Sox? I think we all knew it was Yanks or Houston or finally retirement.
Jim