Something strange came over me as I watched the Reds play in Yankee Stadium last night. It was a feeling I had when at GAB(p) last Friday, too. I was in awe. I couldn't believe it. The Reds were playing the Yankees and Red Sox. I don't know if it's the hyper-focus by the national media that made me think "OMG, we're playing real teams!" or if I've always had a sense of awe about them, but I felt somewhat ashamed within the confines of my living room as I let myself be taken in by the thrill of the New York Yankees as they fell to defeat by my beloved Reds. Woo!
I certainly felt something different when I went to Fenway in 2003 (to see the Yanks play) or to Yankee Stadium in 2006. I thought it only appropriate that the World Series was held in Yankee Stadium in 2001. I rooted my heart out for the Red Sox in 2004 as if I myself added Rs to words that don't have them and dropped them from words that do. I clearly remember watching the 1996 World Series, what some called a "return to glory," feeling it was something special.
I have a confession. I wore a Yankees cap around back then. When I wasn't wearing a Reds cap.
I remember the furor felt around campus at that time. The Yankees were in the World Series. It was that team of the legends, those guys you read about in books, not the losers of the 1980s, the ones whose baseball cards I shrugged away with indifference. One of my professors asked what all of the fuss was about. The Yanks hadn't made the playoffs since 1981! This is a team with more championships than any other professional sports team in the world!
Those days, sadly, are long gone. The naivity of such youth has been replaced by the bitterness of reality. I have learned hate, deep hate (although not as much for them as the Deadbirds.) I have learned the unfairness, the way the rich steal from the poor, the unlevel playing field, A-Rod. I've learned how to pay $8 for a beer without wincing and how to deaden the pain when a player I want to love goes to a team with more money. I've watched as a once great cable channel devoted to sports fell victim to the same demons that play Beatles songs to sell products and that tell people what they are allowed to enjoy and follow. I've seen the poison of corporatism steal the innocence from the game I so love, and the New York Yankees are the ringleaders.
Oh yes, Yankees are loathsome creatures. But there is no denying the mystique that surrounds them. Baseball would not be baseball without them, and I will continue with the occasional goosebumps I get when watching Daryl Thompson make his Major League debut today in Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium.
The Steinbrenners are traitors to the nation for building a new stadium. They should be drawn and quartered. Or tarred and feathered and paraded around Boston, where the people there, baseball gods bless them, saved their own beloved ballpark from the evil fingers of the corporate warlords.
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