Recovery

There is a significant aspect of my long and prestigious – some would say infamous – career as a sports fan that very few people in my life know or remember. It is a secret so deep and dark that almost none that I have met since moving to New York have ever heard the tale, and those who once knew it have mostly forgotten, so well has it been buried. This truth is so shocking that many of you may not believe it, but I promise it is true.

I am a recovering New York Yankees fan.

I know, I know. It may be hard to believe, but there it is – despite my avowed stance as a supporter of the Mets, my frequent enjoyable visits to Red Sox bars, and my occasional vitriol-laced rants against the personal habits and embedded hubris of Yankees fans, I used to be a believer in the Bronx Bombers. It’s been almost six years now since I realized I had a problem, and while I haven’t had any urge to cheer for the pinstripes in many moons, growing up a Yankees fan is still a part of who I was and how I got to be who I am.

The story of how I became a Yankees fan is one that is common throughout sports. I was young and impressionable and the money was good, and the town I grew up in was a Yankees town. While some kids latch onto the sports heroes of their fathers (or occasionally those teams' hated rivals), my dad was not a dedicated fan of any baseball team, leaving me to find my own way in the sport. And so I followed the hometown team, even though those were days when being a Yankees fan was not easy. As I began to follow the team in the late ‘80s it may have been dominated by the formidable Donnie Baseball, but his supporting cast revolved around the likes of Steve Balboni, Jesse Barfield, and a pitching staff of no-name hacks. These were the dark times of meddling by George Steinbrenner, when over-priced veterans were gobbled-up with reckless abandon while the core of the team withered. I lived through and remember (vaguely) Andy Hawkins throwing a no hitter in 1990, only to lose the game four to nil due to some mind-numbing fielding errors late in the game. It was a bad time to be a believer in the team from the Bronx, but I was. (Note: Okay, so maybe when I was ten years old I did not really understand how amazingly awful losing a game where you pitched a no hitter was, but I figured it out within a few years.)

And then, almost without warning, things changed. Steinbrenner was suspended by Major League Baseball, a new GM took over, veterans were shown the door, and young talent was fostered, not traded away – a time of plenty began to descend upon the land. The successful run that started with the epic five-game play-off series against the Mariners in '95 was quickly followed up by the Yanks winning the 1996 World Series in a season which saw the debut of Jeter and the beginning of the rehabilitation of Joe Torre. (Many people may forget, but Torre was considered a failed manager with a few previous teams before starting his Hall of Fame-worthy run with the Yankees.) That first World Championship was followed by a second, third, and fourth in unfathomably quick succession. The good times were at hand and I was a part of it. A faithful fan for a decade, my youthful exuberance was being repaid many times over.

So why then, am I now in recovery? While I’d like to say that perhaps the time for our love had passed, or that we grew apart while I was on assignment in Guam, the truth is that the Yankees abandoned me, and so I abandoned them. In my mind they left behind the players and precepts that had made me love them, and instead embraced something sinister. This break with the past, and the subsequent hardening of my heart towards the Yankees, started with the trade for Roger Clemens before the 1999 season. For years, this man had been built up in my mind, and in the minds of Yankee fans everywhere, as Lucifer incarnate. Initially hated while he was a hard throwing youngster for the BoSox, then reviled as the back-to-back Cy Young winner for the division rival Blue Jays, this was a man who I had been groomed to hate since before I could remember. And suddenly, he was a Yankee. Not only was he a Yankee, but everyone’s favorite gout-sufferer David Wells was the price paid to Toronto for his services. While this rattled my soul and made me question ethics, morals, standards, and the goodness of everything from kittens to sunshine, I was able to rationalize the move as “necessary.” Wells was getting old and fat, Clemens was the re-chiseled hotness (read: juiced), and perhaps the fact that Wells was Big Man On Campus in New York truly was a distraction for the team. My fandom and faith continued on at that point, though it was no longer the pure love of my youth.

The Yanks and I had a few more great years together in college, with homeruns and championships galore, before the massacre of 2001 struck. No, I’m not referring to the loss to the Diamondbacks in the Series, a heart-wrenching blow to be sure, but rather the gut-check response that came that off-season. Suddenly The Boss was back in control, and it was time for vengeance against his team in the face of their World Series loss. (It was totally justified, though. I mean, how could a team be expected to win only three out of four World Series rings? Team chemistry and past service be damned, those a-holes needed to be taught a lesson!) Gone were long-time stalwarts Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill, with Scott Brosius being pushed aside along as well for good measure. In one fell swoop, much of the heart and soul of the team I had adored had been banished to a combination of retirement and St. Louis. To make matters worse, Steinbrenner had signed Jason Giambi, the long-haired leader of the rebellious and uppity Oakland A’s, to be the new first baseman, and for an absurd bounty at that! The horror of it all! Were there no baseball gods left? Did money truly rule everything? Would I have to become an investment banker after all?

After this crushing string of events, and the taste of ashes that it left in my mouth, I became adrift. Left without a favorite team in my favorite sport, I had troubled knowing what to do when the next season came around. I considered giving it the old “college try” and following the Yanks again, but my heart wasn’t into it – my soul had been crushed. Like Moses in the desert I wandered (okay, so maybe not for forty years, but work with me here): I tried to follow the Cardinals, but they were too far afield; I watched the Blue Jays but that just left me feeling empty inside; I even tried embracing Billy Beane, Moneyball, and the A’s. All of these efforts failed to fill the hole and merely served to confuse the hell out of my pro-Yankees friends. Apparently they didn’t get the memo that GM Bob Watson had been canned, the Devil now wore Pinstripes, Wild-thing Giambi had been hired, and Cotton was King. Errr… Cash was King.

While I had yet to find a new team to call my own, the change in attitude of the Yankees, and more importantly the change in my view of them, had given me a new team to hate. With the Zeal of the Converted I attacked everything that was the Yankees. I rooted for the Red Sox, hoped that Clemens’ arm would fall off mid-pitch, prayed for the Knicks to be decent and distracting to New Yorkers – anything to frustrate the Yankees and their partisans. And while this made me feel better and helped start me down the long road to recovery, I still had no team.

This situation was upended in the summer of 2003. As I started a new job, I was thrust into an office of Mets fans and surrounded by newspapers talking about a different and new (to me) New York baseball team. In this environment, a world I didn’t know existed – who knew there were Mets fans? – opened up in front of me. Before I knew it, I was talking Glavine and Piazza, visiting Shea, learning Lazy Mary, and believing in the power of making pitchers bat. My newfound status as a fan of the Metropolitans was solidified in the summer of 2004 when I dated a die-hard Mets fan, one whose dream growing up had been to be the first female Mets third baseman. (Side note: How hot is that?!) As I embraced my new team, its worn down (but easy to get tickets for) stadium, and its gigantic baseball-headed mascot, the next step in my recovery from being a Yankees fan had been taken. While I am still not completely healed from the wounds I received at the hands of the Yankees front-office, I have come a long way in the past six years and have firmly established myself with a new team; I am in a better place. The Yankees were my first team, and helped nurture my love of baseball, but times change and I have moved on. My recovery is going so well that these days I no longer consider Yankees fans to have an indelible mark against their soul and a personality flaw (or at least not an unforgivable one), and I seldom feel the need to break out my PowerPoint presentation entitled Why Rooting for the Yankees is like Cheering for the Communists. This recovery should not be construed as forgiveness, however, as come October – when the playoffs start and I consume a potent number of beers during almost every game – I’ll be ready to chant “Yankees Suck” with the best of ‘em. I just won’t mean it with quite the rage I used to, or with quite the hatred that I feel towards the New York Football Giants. Stupid freakin’ Super Bowl XXV. Man do I hate those guys.