Why the Yankees and Their Fans Deserve To Suffer
by A Yankees Fan
Everybody has at least one friend with whom they hate to go to dinner. Maybe the order is too high-maintenance (“Can you cook half the burger medium well and the other half medium rare? Is the lettuce iceberg or romaine? Red leaf? I like the taste of fries but the shape of onion rings, what can you do for me?”); maybe they’re rude to the waitstaff (“I’m sorry, but if I’m going to pay $30 for a salad I expect that the raspberry vinaigrette will be seedless. I need you to either make that happen or pick these seeds out of my teeth. I feel like that’s fair.”); maybe they just sweat and sigh and scatter food shrapnel everywhere. Whatever. Point is, just being around this person ruins an otherwise enjoyable experience.
That person? That’s every Yankees fan. Me included.
Sure, we lived through the “Stump and Buck” era and watched Mattingly fade gracelessly into the twilight of his career, but since 1996, we’ve become so spoiled that, any time the club faces even a hint of adversity, we throw our hands in the air and start casting blame about like each one of us is auditioning retroactively for the “Mr. Steinbrenner” role on Seinfeld. It’s disgusting. I mean, two years ago during a game against the Red Sox, we booed Mariano Rivera. Mariano Rivera! Are you shitting me? Are we shitting us? You wanna boo Thurman Munson’s ghost next, you bunch of spoiled, insufferable assholes?
The Yankees have won 27 World Series championships; that’s 25% of the World Series ever played. By comparison, the team with the second-most World Series championship victories is the St. Louis Cardinals, with ten. Yet, a Yankees season that ends with anything other than a parade is “a failure” and wholesale changes must be made.
I could go on, but what’s the point? In just the last six years alone, we’ve talked ourselves into Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, A-Rod, Carl Pavano, and Sidney Ponson. That’s like finding a wet scab in your sandwich and not just finishing the sandwich, but doing so with zeal and then declaring, “That wet scab gave my mouth painful itches and now my stomach is an inferno! I can’t wait to come back here tomorrow and order more turkeyscabs!”
Normal fans don’t expect a championship every year and, because of that, they seem to actually enjoy and appreciate their teams’ successes because, y’know, they have endured the numerous failures. Yankees fans need that perspective. We need to spend several years watching our favorite team lose - not just miss out on the World Series, but fucking LOSE, like how losers do - and then maybe we’ll be able to appreciate it when they win. But, as long as there is money to spend and players to spend it on, that won’t happen, and we’ll keep treating every three-game losing streak like we’re watching 2004* unfold before us all over again. We disgust me.
*I am not sure to what, exactly, I am referring here. For some reason, the entirety of the 2004 MLB season has been wiped clean from my memory, and any time I try to discern who won the World Series that year, my eyes start to bleed and I vomit on myself. It’s weird.
