Not long ago now, I was in Ohio yelling about the Yankees. In my hand there was an Italian margarita. The teenaged bartender had mint green nail polish and no answer when asked what this drink contained. I’d been in a greasy, nervous spring slide, an in-between place I lack the constitution to inhabit, watching faceless day games on illegal streams and cracking beers at three, moving in with my girlfriend and worrying all the while, as I carried boxes and dragged my Wayfair mattress to the curb, that I had no money and I’d better not. All this to say I was a little touchy. All this to say I was one hundred thousand pushpins Lego-stacked inside a balloon. But somewhere in there Clayton Kershaw threw seven perfect innings, sanctify everything for an hour, two. And then, on this day in the Midwest, I received good news. A new job, better than the last one. An exciting job, even, if I let myself think so, which I did then, slightly, and do still, though it’s a sentiment I generally avoid, sneering unbecomingly at just the whiff of careerism. I had a happy phone call while at the rental car place in Cleveland and the Circle K Diet Cokes we bought after felt like a celebration. There would be a little gathering that evening. I only did two buttons on my shirt.
We had flown in for a wedding. Beautiful. Just really, actually very good. Heterosexuality redeemed and refined right there before our eyes. Kind families, so sweet your teeth hurt; the right flowers, I stopped in eating my dinner more than once to bend and breathe them; a “Born to Run” string arrangement recessional. I wore a dress that pulled my mind to, at least, a novice’s bleary recreation of Van Gogh sunflowers when I looked in the mirror, and Megan skinned her toe on the pavement during our half-drunk fresh air dance break, bled all over the Akron sidewalk, just around the corner from where the Double A Rubberducks play. A nice time. The Dodgers were in San Diego that weekend. Late April, the season still kicking kinks out of its legs after a longer slumber than tradition demands. The hotel had MLB Network but we never caught the west coast games. We were asleep, or sipping spiked seltzers in a tangle, or screaming along to Fall Out Boy with two dozen other thirty-year-olds, to the horror of the event staff looking on. We ate McDonalds in the Marriott bed. There was a documentary about Don Mattingly on one afternoon in the slow roll from lunch, just the two of us in a brewery, to dinner with friends, also at a brewery. When the big end comes home loud and ravages the world, Northeast Ohio will have left a robust bounty of craft beer available for anyone who survives, which is more than many places can say. Anyway, Buck Showalter said that when he met Don in the minors he knew right away he was going to have to find something other than playing first base for the Yankees to do with his life. I admired that immensely. Of course, it’s easy to say now, long decades later, when things already worked out for Showalter, and he’s had his own illustrious career as a coach, and I’m sure the realization that there was someone openly, obviously better than him right there running roughshod, and not even on purpose, just naturally, over his greatest dream, was not one met without great pain, but he retold it animated by a lazy, tossed-off cheer, and I was jealous, and I’d like to recall my disappointments like that, too.
One thing, by the way, is that the Cleveland team is now the Guardians. In part, this is what I’m getting at. The made-up allegiances we grab to and then grow around to make a life. I knew about the name change, of course, but was reminded by an adult daughter trying to make conversation with her elderly father over burgers at LAX. Well, how are the Guardians? He told her in short sentences, which she followed with pat, lilting statements that did not demand a reply. Oh, yeah, they can hit! And he nodded and then we all filed onto the plane together and soared east. Guardians. I found in Ohio that people said it gingerly, like their tongues and teeth were still working their way around the word, getting the taste and feel, rubbing away rough edges like rocks in a tumbler till it’s river stone smooth and sounds like always. That’s not to be overly precious about it. Certainly, reason says that plenty of individuals are using the old name full stop, like nothing has changed, saying it more than they otherwise might, even, for a tragic little ego rush, and, further, that what a bartender said to me when she knew I’d be tipping her may not hold up as proof of character or intent. Words are squirrelly and using the right ones does not mean moral clarity or social uprightness, and on and on etcetera. And it’s hard to reroute the grooves in your mind. If there was the distinct minty breeze of a wink in the voice of the husband of a friend of my friend’s at the party when he said The Cleveland Baseball Team, as if almost, but not quite, asking to have the issue pressed, then so be it. I was happy enough to perch precariously on the edge of a possibly antique armchair that everyone insisted I wouldn’t break (I didn’t, but not for lack of envisioning it happening again and again in my head) in the mood-lit back room of a cute little nowhere place, just right, and chat loosely with old friends and strangers while an unimportant early season baseball game sprawled its way meanderingly into history on the mounted screen ten yards away. The rechristened Cleveland Guardians played the dreaded New York Yankees. And the Yankees had been having a very bad week, but that night they were winning, as happens in baseball and life. This husband of a friend of my friend’s perhaps wasn’t sure how to talk to queers, since we had already well covered the subject of Lowes vs Home Depot, and he said to me, “God… Those Yankees.” A shorthand. We commiserated idly. The evil empire. No beards allowed? Fascist! These old standbys. A language even the most casual baseball fan can speak. We hate those guys. Like rooting for US Steel!!
Had a friend from New Jersey not perked up then in defense, we would have moved on fast, I’m sure. She said the Yankees aren’t really so bad, not actually any more deserving of animus than any other team. Reasonable enough/A starting gun. Not a sports person, doesn’t follow the team, but she dug in her heels, as is anyone’s right, and, oh, you forget. I forgot. I’d forgotten how lovely it can feel to argue about something that doesn’t matter. I forgot how much I love to hate the New York Yankees.
I was born an American League girl, you know. I’ve absconded all the way west to the other sea and maybe people forget. Maybe I let it happen. I am in Los Angeles but not of it, though sometimes I play pretend. As I grew, I made all my Catholic sacraments, but the rule of law in my childhood home was not God but the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees were the great bogeyman I was taught to revile. This was a hate as ingrained in me as the muscle memory of genuflecting at the church pew, as baked in as bad eyesight and weak lungs and a taste for salt. A loathing beyond thought, cellular. Yankees Suck t-shirts had to be banned at my school. Too many kids had them. Somebody found it vulgar. Maybe they didn’t know about the bumper stickers where that weird spiky haired cartoon kid urinates on the Yankees logo. This hatred wasn’t logical. Certainly, our low opinion of both the cultural behemoth that is the Yankees, and the team itself, did not reflect reality. The Yankees were very good and we hated them. Yankees suck. We sang it on school buses, but only because so did our uncles, so did drunk ruddy faced people at Fenway, and sometimes at other wholly un baseball related events, concerts, anything with a crowd. It wasn’t reason. It wasn’t noble, or righteous, or particularly special. It was grubby pug-nosed jealousy, jam-faced little brother belly-aching. But it was ours. A birthright of weathering belly blows and coming up biting like a hit dog. I was eleven years old for the Aaron Boone game 7 home run in 2003 and I cried myself to sleep. Had anyone attempted to suggest I put my small misfortunes in perspective, it would have been impossible. But I was in Massachusetts so no one tried. Once more our beloved David had been felled by the hideous Goliath in pinstripes. To hate them was self-defense, then. The work of it distracted from sorrow. I was twelve when it happened at last, in 2004, It, and I know nothing will ever be like that again. I sound deranged but I’m right and what’s more is I think I got lucky. Was freed. A searing, silly, mountainous kind of joy heaped upon me when I was old enough to feel it, and young enough to have nothing else in my life to keep me from feeling it feeling it feeling it.
If anything, I love baseball more today than I did as a child. Understand it better, appreciate the nuances with greater reverence. I watch games from all over the league now. I read about it, think about it. I’m a half-assed student of the game who still gets almost sick with happiness when I first glimpse the great open green of a big league outfield on the walk to my seat. I love baseball. But I will never love a team the way I loved those Red Sox when I was stocky in glasses with boys’ zip off convertible cargo pants. The 2007 win was a party, but it was already over, that hot everywhere thrill, and 2013 I barely recall. Loving the Red Sox became a perfunctory personal detail of mine. I like baseball, I’m from New England, sure, I’m a Sox fan, fine. When I moved away, I found a new kind of fandom that was a better fit for the life I live now. When I was alone in Los Angeles, I had the Dodgers, and I’ve kept them, not with the starved fierceness of my girlhood Boston loyalty, but no less fondly. It is a new experience, to come to a team without generations of baggage, to decide on a certain set of boys just because they happen to play down the street, and to learn to love them because of the good luck of our being together. I grew up ninety minutes from Boston with working parents and two siblings. Maybe we saw a couple games a year. Now, I can see the Dodgers anytime I want to pay 16 dollars for Bud Light. They’re a sunny walk away. Having outgrown my inheritance, I picked up a future I found. It’s new and clean and mine, untied entirely from where I come from and was, and I like that. Plus, I look good in blue.
So are the Yankees bad? No and also absolutely. I hesitate to offer that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, as I do not wish to be shoved into a locker, but it does, I think, serve us well to remember that our personal choices, especially regarding things as ultimately vapid as what kind of entertainment to consume, say little to nothing about our character, our status as a citizen of the globe. It can be hard to see this when basically all of human experience has been eaten up by spurious culture wars, an endless death march to assign point values to every frivolous behavior, but it’s the truth. The stuff we fill up our world with is still only stuff. To be a fan of some small market team just scraping by (note: none of them are actually just scraping by, that’s a whole separate scam) does not make one a better person any more than avoiding Marvel movies makes me one. I don’t like those movies, so I don’t watch them, and the Dodgers play in town, so they’re my team. Anything emotional that I would attach beyond that, in either case, is just fantasy used to color the hours of the days of the years. The material reality is irrelevant in the dream world where we pretend MLB games are about something other than taking our money. It’s not that nothing matters, only that everything matters as much as you decide.
The truth is the friend who was sticking up for the Yankees was right, albeit by default. They’re not so bad. They’re not so bad, because they’re all bad. In a sea of congressionally protected money laundering robber barons, what’s one more? Find me a professional sports team in the world without an unseemly story in its past and I’ll tell you to work on your Googling. No team is without real, damning problems, because they’re not teams, really. They’re giant businesses. And giant businesses are unconcerned with sentiment. The Dodger ownership group did not consider me, to offer just one very glaring example, in choosing to sign Trevor Bauer, and so I do not consider them in choosing to continue enjoying the games. If this is viewed by some as a dereliction of duty on my part, I accept. The way some billionaire handles his team impacts my opinion of that man, maybe, if I have one, if I decide to care, but it doesn’t impact what a home run looks like. A well-turned double play sings the same even if the stadium was paid for with ill-gotten public funds, I’m afraid. People do bad things and companies made up of dozens of mostly rich white male type people are more inclined to this than average. I don’t celebrate this fact, but I’m not interested in agonizing over it either. I am not here chasing good, but a good time. Not even the tainted Astros are meaningfully “worse”, for whatever that means, than any other team, though they deserve whatever disgust people might like to heap on them, and though I support the booing. They were stupider, probably, and easily more gauche, but it’s all relative, and as there is no one without mud on their face, I have little patience for handwringing, or attempts to purify that which you’ve decided to hang your heart on.
We don’t root for teams because we have anything to gain from their successes. We do it because it’s feels good to be a part of a large choral voice reaching out as one, calling. It’s why cults exist and churches stay rich. Oh, we like a little ritual. “It’s rooting for laundry, anyway,” I said that night in Ohio, just to be a monster, gaze fluttering down to Earth from a perch of false equanimity. I didn’t mean it. Or I meant it, but it doesn’t matter. I meant it, but it’s all relative. It’s rooting for laundry, but if doing so brings some small value, some treasurable little piece of meaning, to a person’s existence then it’s okay. And to hate laundry? Is it not just the same? It’s all right. I don’t hate the Yankees because I think they are some force for evil in this world. I hate them for stupid reasons, as it is my great human privilege to do. I hate them because they’re squares, and their vibes are off, because they beat my team too many times, because my dad does, because their logo is ugly, because any guy that goes there immediately becomes measurably less hot, because I like to, because it’s fun. We the few (very many) the brave the proud the people who get to hate the New York Yankees are not heroic, but we are having a ball.
To love is a funny and shape-shifting thing, new each time someone dares do it. People love in more ways than can be counted, or understood. We know this because some people love the Mets. There are loves hungry for glory and those which crave gentleness and the kinds that take whatever there is to have. The love I had for the Red Sox as a child is a separate and entirely apart from the way I feel about the Dodgers today. To love, even, the New York Yankees, really and truly, for whatever reason you’ve been set to walk such a path, is in no way lesser, by no measure more impure, than to love any other team. It’s a kind of magic, sharing in, with strangers, all the highs and lows of an entity to which you tied yourself so intimately. No, to love the Yankees is not bad. But to hate them is divine.
Another great piece, Tess, thanks! At Giants games, fans yell Dodgers suck! at every. single. game. It’s so inane. And demonstrably false. And as you say divine.