Caterpillar Cowboy

There seem to be a lot of people angry, or at least bitter, that the Yankees won, this feeling being tied to the team’s high payroll and large investment in personnel last offseason. My reaction is the same as it’s been: what else would you have them do with the money? The Yankees generate enormous revenues not just for themselves, but for the other 29 teams and for MLB as an entity. They take that money and try to make their product better. Short of the silliness of “well, they could lower ticket prices,” which would just mean transferring money from their pockets not to fans, but to sellers in the secondary market, what, exactly, should they do with all the money they have other than make the team as good as they can?

That’s an argument we’ve had, and I don’t mind having it. What bugged me about the tone of the reaction I’m seeing is the anger towards Yankee fans, as if they should somehow not be happy that their favorite team won, or that they’re in some way lesser people for rooting for the Yankees. Baseball isn’t a morality play, it’s a business. That applies a million-fold to being a baseball fan. I don’t know how other people came to their loyalties, but when it comes to baseball, mine were set as a child, and came through my family, and I’m willing to bet that’s the case for most people. You root for the local team or you root for the team your folks root for, or maybe you root for some other team, but you probably forged that bond before you lost your virginity. To criticize people for choices made…no, for something that wasn’t even a choice, just something that happened before they even knew it… is insane.

I’ve made this point before, but since I’ve made my fandom part of my work over the years, I should make it again. There are Yankee fans who remember a time before 1996. There are Yankee fans who, like myself, lived through a lot of crappy baseball in the 1980s, a lot of dumb free-agent signings, through a Mets era in New York for the most part, through the Oscar Azocar Yankees and Stump Merrill and “I just won you the pennant.” Being a Yankee fan has never been what being a Pirates fan is, but even as I write that sentence, I think about being 22 years old and having seen a hell of a lot more Pirates postseason games than Yankee ones.

So, stop criticizing people’s fandom. You want to criticize the economic system of baseball, fine, but stop acting as if being a fan of a certain team says something about a person. It probably just means that their dad watched the game every night, or their grandpa took them to watch that team in their first game, or their aunt gave them a jersey when they were six years old and they slept in it every night, dreaming of wearing it on a green field in front of a big crowd on a sunny day.