Over the next two days, TYU will be running four guest posts from four excellent writers. The first comes from frequent RAB commenter Riddering, who some of you might recognize from Twitter as @riddering. Riddering was spurred to write by Will Leitch’s Yankees preview over at Deadspin yesterday. I greatly enjoyed reading the post, and I am sure you will too.
Early on in Spring Training this year Chan Ho Park experienced tightness in his glutes, pushing back his bullpen sessions. When he was questioned on it by various writers who cover the Yankees, he asked, “Is this big news?”
New York is different.
Over at Deadspin Will Leitch is writing a series of articles on each major league club as the regular season draws near. His article on the Yankees frames itself around the notion of Yankee Fans. They are not patient. They are not kind. They envy talents on other teams. They boast whenever possible. They are very proud. They are fans as long as the team is winning. The tears they shed after a championship only last so long before they harden themselves to conquer the next one. They trade away players who don’t please them.
–wait a minute. When did Yankee fans become George Steinbrenner? What unholy event granted the fandom his temperament and powers? I do not recall the fans of the New York Yankees trading Alfonso Soriano because he lacked the stoicism required to be part of the team. Surely had this been possible Carl Pavano would have been released rather than retained through his contract years.
Leitch confuses the Yankee machine of ownership, media, and fans. Oh, fans can be ornery—of that there is no doubt. However, there is only so much their displeasure can do. George Steinbrenner is the man who traded away certain players when they did not meet his immediate expectations. The media reports on every move the organization makes and often presents editorials on players, such as A-Rod, that can be misconstrued as being a report on the feelings of the fans.
Leitch makes another error in this article and this one more regrettable. Instead of following the data to a story, he excludes that which doesn’t confirm his profile of the typical Yankee fan. The results make the story much lesser than what could have been.
I believe that if Leitch had come into this article with a more open mind he would have found a better story to tell. That is the curious case of Yankee fans and how exactly a fan base is shaped by the World Championships its team has won.
“Until you win one, here, you’re nothing. (Unless you’re Don Mattingly.) Even if you have little to do with the outcome at all.”
Yankee fans only treasure those who win The Big One. This would be true if not for the list of players who are treasured even though they never won a championship in New York: Don Mattingly, as mentioned, Mike Mussina, Bobby Murcer, Aaron Boone, and Dave Winfield to name a few players. These men sustained excellence on the field with the Yankees or they just had the luck to run into one when the moment was grand enough to remain in people’s memories for years to come. All without taking home a championship for New York. Murcer, Mattingly, and Mussina unfortunately played in times when the Yankees weren’t conquering the world of baseball but they somehow managed to capture the loyalty of the fans. Winfield too missed out on a championship and was dubbed Mr. May by George Steinbrenner. Yet this Hall of Fame player is thought well of in his time in pinstripes. Captain Derek Jeter himself recalls Winfield being the player he idolized as a kid. Aaron Bleepin’ Boone won no ring in New York but no Yankee fan can hear his name mentioned without smiling.
Yet there’s no denying that the list of Yankee Legends with a ring is longer than the list of Yankee Legends without one.
Each team in baseball has its outstanding players, treasured by the fans and lifted up in legend by the franchise. However, when a team has won 27 championships in less than a century it becomes more difficult to extract players who were on the team for a significant period of time without winning a championship. If you’re a quality player on a team that wins the big one so very often the odds are in your favor. It’s a problem no Yankee fan would complain about but this is the chicken that came before the egg and those quick to criticize this fan base seem blind to the conundrum.
Do the Yankees have so many retired numbers because of the championships this team has won or do they have so many championships because of the players who possessed such talent to place their numbers on a wall and their likenesses in a monument?
How do you solve a problem like too many excellent players being fortunate enough to come together to use their excellence to win the ultimate prize in baseball?
We cannot determine whether or not certain Yankee figures would be so appreciated had they not won a single World Championship. Perhaps in an alternate universe there is a beloved Yogi Berra who possesses not a ring for one finger nor such a quality bat nor teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. It’s true that if you ask a Yankee fan of any age to name their favorite Yankee you’re more than likely to hear a player who possesses a ring. Yet this is no “Aha!” moment. It’s just the likelihood of the odds from this, the winningest franchise in sports history.
There might be a few hipster Yankee fans out there who dismiss the winners and instead wear names such as Balboni or Pipp on their backs but let’s not get distracted by outliers.
Where does all this winning leave the modern Yankee fan, victim of winning circumstance and misrepresentation?
We Yankee fans have the history to know the team has won a World Series Championship every ~3.2 years since 1923. Odds were in the past that if you played in New York long enough you’d get yourself a ring but that’s no guarantee for the present or the next ten years and it’s not a value we can use to project the future of the franchise or the quality of its players. We shouldn’t take that for granted. To achieve the ultimate goal in professional baseball all it takes is a moment—sometimes. At other times a career of talent and desire cannot be enough.
Let’s not fulfill this prophecy of Yankee fans suffering from Steinbrennerism. For 2010 let’s make sure we aren’t judging Javier Vazquez based on one bad pitch amidst a career of quality innings. Let’s not come to the season and the new players with a narrative already in mind. Let’s allow it to be played and evaluated as the games unfold.
How about we show we’re better at analyzing our team than Will Leitch is at analyzing its fans?
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16 Responses to Guest Post: Leitch Wrong On Yankee Fans
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TIQ IQ
I think you make an excellent point about the non-Champions. They simply stick out due to their being an anomaly in the club’s history. And as you noted, even those players are quite well-liked.
The entire post is spot on. As you said, let’s not judge players like Vazquez on one or two months rather than an entire career. As Sabathia, A-Rod, and Marte showed last postseason, relying on small sample failures will come back to bite you.
As much as I disagreed with Leitch’s article it does serve a purpose of reminding fans, “Don’t be that guy.”
Thanks again for letting me contribute, Moshe!
This is great writing. While some of Leitch’s points were just wrong (the Soriano thing? As you said, they didn’t trade Soriano because he wasn’t stoic enough for the Yankees, according to the fans. They traded him because he was required to obtain one of the best players in the history of the game.), I would argue that a good number of Yankee fans are like this. Not the ones that post here or RAB or have the best Yankee blogs – they are obviously different. Almost every Yankee fan I know IRL thinks we’d be better off with Melky than Javy Vazquez, which is totally ridiculous. Look at the comments on the NY Times article when the Yankees traded for Javy in this offseason. Most fans don’t look at Javy’s career, they judge him by one season. Not even: one half-season. Not even that, actually: one pitch. They don’t understand the idea of “small sample size.” Sure, TYU won’t do that, but if Javy struggles at all, he’s going to get booed.
The reason Aaron Boone is so beloved is because of that home run. If he didn’t have that, he’d only be one of the many meh utility players that passed through here, looked back on as fondly as, say, Enrique Wilson or Juan Rivera, which is to say not very fondly at all. And I’ve heard a bunch of Yankee fans say they can’t watch that game with the home run because they know that in the 2003 World Series, he couldn’t get a guy in from third with less than two outs. That’s Yankee fans for you. Moose might be liked (I wouldn’t say treasured), but most Yankee fans don’t like him nearly as much as Andy Pettitte, despite the fact that Moose is a better pitcher than Andy – at least until Andy went to Houston, then he became the guy who blew up against Arizona, couldn’t outduel Beckett, and and followed Clemens around like a pathetic puppy. That’s just the way a lot of Yankee fans are.
Also: Alex Rodriguez. That’s really all I have to say. Well, that and I wish I could garrote anyone who ever booed him. Teixeira, despite having the “perfect Yankee personality” according to Leitch (read: he thinks that means no personality at all), got booed through April and early May. Heck, look at his thread at nyyfans.com during the playoffs. Incredibly ugly.
Then again, Leitch HAS said this about Yankee fans vs. Mets fans in the past:
The upscale-SUV-driving-Hamptons-grasping-banker-Rudy-aspirational crowd—currently dressed up as empty Luxury Suites seats—is for the Yankees, and the regular-guy-immigrant-friendly-hardworking-slob-with-a-heart crowd is for the Mets. An oversimplification? Sure!
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/57487/
I do think Yankee fans – and again, I don’t mean the people here and at similar sites – are unbelievably spoiled and very much “what have you done for me lately?” On another website I go to that’s not baseball-related but has a sports section for general chatter, a Yankee fan was complaining about how CC “sucked” after Game 1 of the World Series. That’s the definition of spoiled. THAT characterization is just wrong, though.
This was pretty long (TWSS!!!), so apologies. I’m just very grateful I found sites like this, with smart, rational fans and excellent writing like this piece.
I should add, Mattingly is the exception that proves the rule. He is unquestionably, unconditionally, beloved. At the same time, it proves how irrational people can be; fans can understand that one guy can be fantastic though the team surrounding him is less fantastic than other teams, and bad hops here and there can lead to losing in the playoffs when it comes to Mattingly, while they couldn’t do it for A-Rod.
Happy fans are all alike; every unhappy group of fans is unhappy in their own way.
I agree that a significant portion of Yankee fans are too often disatisfied for inane reasons and its only highlighted due to the success of the team for the past 15 years (and their entire history, really, but you only have to go back to 1996 to see the Yankees as underdogs). But that’s humanity. Take any large population and you’ll find similar personality splits, albeit stemming from a wider variety of interests to grouse about or delight in or anywhere in between. I’m sure there are Royals fans who are just as unreasonable as those whining about Javy or calling Joba a SP bust but their team’s current state influences how they are viewed and how they express that unreasonablness. (“The Process is going to be a success. The Process is going to be a success.”)
I don’t live in NY so I’m not surrounded by Yankee fans but it seems like too often people remember the most ridiculous statement they’ve heard and then attribute it to all fans who are less than reasonable. It could be then many people criticized CC after that Game 1 or forgot Andy’s Yankee tenure once he left or walk around with a diet Coke in hand, still calling Teixeira’s April atrocious. Being the optimist that I am, I’d rather believe that’s the rare extremist rather than the norm.
Side note: isn’t it funny how Leitch calls “Robo-Tex” the perfect Yankee personality yet in the 90s dynasty it was Paul O’Neill getting all the love for his insane cooler smashing and in 2007 Joba the fistpumper fired up the fans and etc. etc?
Nice post, Riddering. I know Leitch was making fun of a certain segment of the fanbase, but that doesn’t make it any less lame that he can’t seem to write anything about the Yankees that isn’t tinged with this same old sentiment. I’ve always thought his writing was fun, but he has certain blindspots… And one of those, in my opinion, is a major NY/Yankees-related blindspot. Generalizing and joking about entitled/boorish NYers and Yankees fans is hackneyed on a general level, and Leitch’s beating of that dead horse is just tedious at this point. My reaction, at this point, is something like: ‘Leitch wrote another piece making fun the caricature of the entitled NYer and/or Yankees fan? Yawn. Mah Nishtanah.’
And it’s kind of funny in a way for Leitch to act like that, since the guy is a Brooklyn transplant who writes for Gawker and NY Mag and talks about Woody Allen movies incessantly. You’re hitting a couple of the more vomit-inducing NYer stereotypes there, Will. Methinks you might be projecting just a tad when you feel the constant need to be so patronizing towards NYers in your writing.
After the influx of so many critical Yankee articles, this one forced my hand with a rebuttal. Win one World Series and everyone’s a critic. Sheesh.
The thing is: New York is such a Yankee town and there are so many fans that writers are bound to have somebody represent their wild portrait of a fan. Earlier this year when the PECOTA projections were first released it became a trending topic on Twitter for New Yorkers. That’s insane, in a lovely way.
Hey, Riddering. Cool post! Congrats.
What got me about the article you’re talking about was this part of the piece:
“Alex Rodriguez was the epitome of non-Yankee-dom, until he hit a few homers in the World Series in the rain. Now, you’d never think anyone ever had anything bad to say about him.”
Really? On what planet has A-Rod become so beloved? I seem to remember seeing a controversy or two regarding him this spring, regarding HGH and his Maybach fender-bender. Granted, the hatred against him isn’t so virulent, but it’s still out there in the media, and in the blogosphere.
But that wasn’t the only fact-challenged tidbit in those two sentences. A-Rod didn’t hit “a few homers in the World Series in the rain.” He hit one homer in the series, after the rain delay in Game 3. The homer was against Cole Hamels – and the TV camera! And while the homer didn’t appear to rattle Hamels, it did not put the Yankees ahead, or tie the game. Also, it wasn’t even called a homer at first; it was initally ruled a double, until the umpires reviewed it via instant replay. Given that it was the first-ever instant replay homer in the playoffs, it was a cool moment. But it wasn’t even A-Rod’s best moment in the series – that would be the double in the Damon’s Dash Game. And the big homer A-Rod hit in the rain in the playoffs was Game 2 of the ALCS; it tied the game in extra innings.
But while I personally don’t believe in the true Yankee nonsense, if you had to pick A-Rod’s so-called “True Yankee” moment in the playoffs, it would be Game 2 of the ALDS against Joe Nathan. The game-tying homer A-Rod hit was the first big turning point of the Yankees postseason. If the Yanks had lost that game, they would have been heading to Minnesota tied 1-1. And it was arguably the biggest hitr of Alex’s career. Hitting that homer got the playoff monkey off his back. You’d expect a New York sportswriter to be able to identify this moment better.
The True Yankee designation is such an annoyance. There are Yankees that will be considered gods among men for all time, yes. That doesn’t make them a truer member of the team than anyone else who has put on the uniform. Carl Pavano’s stint as a Yankee is just as true as Derek Jeter’s, no matter how many would like to write it off as a fictional horror film.
Your comments about A-Rod are sport on. Pretty much every Yankee fan was ecstatic at his postseason performance but how many who wrote him off since “failing” in 2004 and subsequent postseasons changed their hearts and minds about him for good?
Baseball changed with free agency and when Charlie O figured out early what baseball was going to become. The Yankees who always focused on winning it all, fumbled and stumbled for a bit until they got it right. Mr. Steinbrenner knew the formula but his quirks and impatience occasionally got in the way. A friend of mine is in the used car business and explained to me that you cannot fall in love with the inventory, and that sentiment cannot get in the way of making a profit or winning. What the Yankees finally figured out is that team chemistry is important to winning. The Yankees have figured it all out, what it takes to put a winning team on the field, fans in the seats and how to market the brand, others are slow learners.
I’d be hesitant to put too much stock in chemistry or in assuming that it comes before winning. Developing and obtaining the best talent possible is important and when you can have talent and a pleasant personality it’s the icing on the cake–as we saw last year.
Riddering. Great post.
It use to be, writers were “Investigative Reporters”…nowadays, not so much. The great Mel Allen was such a reporter, he would dig up some of the funniest and factual stuff about the players or others within the game. He wrote of the Negro League and their players, about Three Fingers Brown, Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean etc. Many of the stories and people he wrote of, may have been long forgotten by now, if not for his reporting and the book he wrote, putting all the stories into.
Now days, they (not all) sit around waiting to get a story from the players themselves or they make one up by misquoting someone.
There are some fine reporters out there but, they get tarred by the same brush.
You could say certain reporters give the entire profession a bad rep…just as with Yankee fans!
Honestly, for people who are paid to write on sports they need to work to bring sharp clarity to readers on the sport, its players, and the events taking place. Too many writers have shown less accountability and talent than bloggers working for free which is no surprise but still irks people paying attention.
Nicely done Riddering, this is Championship-level writing.
Soooo. . . . .when’s your NEXT guest post, huh? WHEN?!?!
/cracks under the pressure
/is sent to the pen
Agree, when are you coming back for a rematch…Riddering.
Not only a well done post but, very good comments with humor and follow-ups.