"HATE" IS A STRONG WORD: Unless George is involved
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“Hate†is such a harsh word. We really shouldn’t be practicing it or passing it down to our offspring anyway, and Lord knows this cruel world doesn’t need any additional preaching of animosity toward any of God’s creatures.Like it or not, though, hating the Yankees has become a time-tested avocation. You certainly don’t have to be a Red Sox fan to despise the Pinstripers; heck, Mets fans have been doing it for decades, and New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers fans engaged in it long before them.
But the Yankees are a polarizing team; you either love ’em or you hate ’em, and there’s rarely any in-between. Oh sure, there’s often a certain amount of begrudging respect blended in with non-Yankee fans’ venom, but usually not enough to convince them that the New York professional baseball club is an organization worth rooting for.
Yankee fans are everywhere, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re significantly outnumbered by those who hold George Steinbrenner’s team in contempt. Professional sports teams that enjoy inordinate amounts of success tend to generate this kind of disdain — after all, whose favorite ballclub hasn’t been vanquished by the Yankees at one point or another? The same kind of demonization is often directed at the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, whose total of 24 Stanley Cup championships closely rivals the Yankees’ 26 World Series victories, making those two teams the most successful franchises in North American history.
And not surprisingly, the most despised.
Winning, like familiarity, breeds contempt from the outside, especially when it comes at your team’s expense; that’s why there’s no Padres Haters Guide being readied for publication, nor any university course listings for Mariners Hating 101.
And while there certainly are plenty of folks out there who could tell us a thing or two about why the Red Sox are worthy of loathing, that kind of advice isn’t usually welcomed in this town, and is certainly not appropriate for a newspaper supplement of this nature. The Red Sox probably do have enough faults that are worthy of publication, but putting them down in print wouldn’t necessarily guarantee a healthy readership — not around here, anyway.
So let’s focus on the Yankees. Is there reasonable justification for this franchise’s being so roundly hated? Is their roster so littered with despicable characters that the whole organization is deserving of condemnation and scorn?
Here are some factors that have undoubtedly contributed to fans’ passionate dislike for all things pinstriped.
• Let’s start with the fashion, shall we? There’s nothing wrong with the Yankee uniform, per se. It’s clean and neat and strongly rooted in tradition. And I can even see why the team doesn’t put the player’s name on the back of the home uniform; a lot of teams don’t, including the Red Sox and the Dodgers. But how come the team can’t deign to put their players’ names on the flip side of their road uniforms? Is there some conspiracy with the program-sellers to make sure that fans purchase a book so that they’ll know who’s who? It’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think, for the Yankees to assume that their players will be instantly recognized by numeral alone when they’re playing in visiting stadiums? I guess Yankee Haters should be happy that the team doesn’t have pinstripes on their road jerseys; that would represent the height of carrying “tradition†a little too far.
