Yankee fans are people too.
That was what I finally understood in the late innings of the game where the Yanks took out the Halos at the new Stadium in the Bronx. Watching the mass of excited faces, some praying, some hiding their faces (the team from Orange County was a hit away from tying it up), some on the verge of tears and some hooting like soccer hooligans, I realized much to my horror and surprise that Yankee fans are just a bunch of New York schlubs and no different than anyone else in this enormous small town.
Traditionally I am a Met fan. Which means I have watched the team crumble four years running; and that includes watching the most recent season become classifiable into that worst of all classes for a sporting event: boring. They have a new stadium--I liked Shea (Shake Shack? I came to watch a ballgame). They decked it out with stuff about some Dodger player--stupid. They have a formerly dynamic shortstop who can't run anymore. They have a young "superstar" who forgot how to hit homers this season and who for several seasons has not gotten many clutch hits of any kind though he has "good numbers". How dull.
You might say I have stopped really caring about the baseball team I've long rooted for. And during this window of sanity I have seen that the notion of "rooting", especially in a two-team city, is a painful, unnecessary distraction (perhaps I would feel different if my team had won 26 World Series); and that it falsely creates a disputatious relationship with one's fellow townsfolk.
I am a lover of the game of baseball--nothing will take away from the beauty of a well-hit line drive nor from the symmetry of men circling the bases trying to beat the throw home--but I think my rooting days are drawing to an end. I remember suffering greatly as the Mets failed in three successive seasons (not including this year when I tuned out very early). I have promised myself I will never allow myself to suffer that way again over anything as trifling as a ballteam.
And one of the happy outcomes of this is I have seen the humanity in the formerly hated Yankee fan. Arrogant and foolish and full of false pride (and an even more false sense of superiority and accomplishment), they are not so different than the run of humanity. Really, they are just typically bumbling New Yorkers trying to feel good about themselves for one night.
I will be watching the World Series. I have in the past of course also hated the Phillies. I don't now. May the best team win.
