Friday, September 07, 2012
The New Yankee Way
"I love that it's a close race because I just love good baseball."
"I'm glad to see Showalter succeed."
And countless sentences starting with
"Even if we don't win..."
Mike Francessa just casually said "hey, it's possible the Yanks don't make the playoffs. That's fine. Nothin' wrong with that."
So the attitude of the team with the biggest payroll, with a division and two wild card spots available, is suddenly there's nothing wrong with not making the playoffs? I didn't hear anybody say that in April.
And how are these "winning is more important than breathing" fans able to say with a straight face: "if we don't win"? While tied for first place! I'll tell you why. Because Yankee fans need to win. And if they discover that their own team might not win, they quickly come up with alternate idea. If you act like you don't care if your team loses, you win when they when and when they lose.
They've always done that--we all know about the mass exodus that occurs when the Mets are good and the Yanks aren't ("I just root for New York!")--but at least in the past they'd wait till their own team was out of it. But thanks to the 2004 Red Sox (the gift that keeps on giving), they now start planning for failure before it even happens!
Of course, I always get pleasure from seeing the Yanks lose even when own team is out of it. But here's the huge difference. When you constantly brag about your 27 championships, and when your team's goal every year is to win another one, you can't take credit for a "win" unless you actually win. And they're not even doing the thing of being happy at their rival's failures, they're claiming to be okay with their own team losing! (Again, pre-emptively even.) They're so afraid of everybody mocking them all off-season (at least maybe they'll get lucky and people will blame it on how they played and not buy into the media making up random stories of why) that they're trying to deflect it by acting like they won't even care if they don't win. Can one Yankee fan please come out and admit he's pissed and he wants nothing more than for his team to win every game by ten runs and sweep through the playoffs? I never heard this "I'm just rooting for good baseball/If we don't win here's my plan" bullshit when they were ten games up....
"I'm glad to see Showalter succeed."
And countless sentences starting with
"Even if we don't win..."
Mike Francessa just casually said "hey, it's possible the Yanks don't make the playoffs. That's fine. Nothin' wrong with that."
So the attitude of the team with the biggest payroll, with a division and two wild card spots available, is suddenly there's nothing wrong with not making the playoffs? I didn't hear anybody say that in April.
And how are these "winning is more important than breathing" fans able to say with a straight face: "if we don't win"? While tied for first place! I'll tell you why. Because Yankee fans need to win. And if they discover that their own team might not win, they quickly come up with alternate idea. If you act like you don't care if your team loses, you win when they when and when they lose.
They've always done that--we all know about the mass exodus that occurs when the Mets are good and the Yanks aren't ("I just root for New York!")--but at least in the past they'd wait till their own team was out of it. But thanks to the 2004 Red Sox (the gift that keeps on giving), they now start planning for failure before it even happens!
Of course, I always get pleasure from seeing the Yanks lose even when own team is out of it. But here's the huge difference. When you constantly brag about your 27 championships, and when your team's goal every year is to win another one, you can't take credit for a "win" unless you actually win. And they're not even doing the thing of being happy at their rival's failures, they're claiming to be okay with their own team losing! (Again, pre-emptively even.) They're so afraid of everybody mocking them all off-season (at least maybe they'll get lucky and people will blame it on how they played and not buy into the media making up random stories of why) that they're trying to deflect it by acting like they won't even care if they don't win. Can one Yankee fan please come out and admit he's pissed and he wants nothing more than for his team to win every game by ten runs and sweep through the playoffs? I never heard this "I'm just rooting for good baseball/If we don't win here's my plan" bullshit when they were ten games up....
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