Yankees Suck

Being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan, there’s no reason for me to be paying any attention whatsoever to this year’s World Series, not that I have access to it anyway. That said, being a lifelong, born-and-raised Red Sox fan I am, of course, contractually obligated to be rooting against the New York Yankees.

Fortunately, this is made all the easier because they have fans like this who literally for all intents and purposes are dangling an opposing player from the edge of the stands by his arm in order to pry open the glove in which he has just caught a fly ball, in order to then throw the ball back into the field of play.

They were, thankfully, ejected and despite initial reports that the Yankees would allow them back for Game 5, Major League Baseball apparently overruled them, which of course is the objectively correct decision.

My first thought here wasn’t that Yankees fans are the worst, although they are, but that this is what happens when fans learn about the rules of baseball by watching the way Alex Rodriguez played the game.

I’ll just mention here that of course my real issue isn’t with Yankees fans, per se, but with asshole fans with an outsized sense of entitlement. There’s surely plenty of those in Boston, too, but what they didn’t have in Boston, however, was A-Rod.

When your marquee player for a long stretch of time was a guy who shouts “Mine!” to try to fool a opposing player into not catching a ball and who literally slaps the ball out of another player’s hand in an attempt to be safe at first, and when an entire generation of fans grows up watching that sort of gameplay without any real consequence, well: these are the kinds of fans your franchise grows.

In the end, I care less about how good of an athlete you are and much more about how good of a sportsman you are. This distinction extends to baseball fans, too, whose first allegiance should be to the game.

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Addenda

1. Over on social, someone mentioned the fact that A-Rod almost was traded to the Red Sox from the Texas Rangers back in 2003, but the Players Association nixed the deal. Had this happened, I was told, “we would have cheered his every irritating move, because that’s how fandom works”.

   Maybe that’s how fandom works for you, but I find fandom different from fanaticism. My loyalty always has been to the game, and my team the medium through which I enjoy that game. I’ve done my fair share of ripping Red Sox players when required, and A-Rod in Boston would have been absolutely fucking toxic.

2. Hilariously, in my Homicide rewatch I’m on the season six episode where one Yankees fan kills another for saying the Orioles are the better team.

3. Then I managed to check in on Gameday at just the right moment to see that dingus Verdugo have to wear being the last out of the World Series, and on a strikeout at that. Happy Yankee Elimination Day to all who celebrate.