Gee, thanks, Yankees. I had a whole rant planned about how much you guys have sucked the bag so far this season, and the reasons why, but can I bust out all that fulminating and finger-pointing now? Noooooo. You had to go and haul your asses up to .500 and wreck my flow. GOOD ONE.

We’ve all heard the expression that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for the phone company, but until about a week ago, rooting for the Yankees had started to feel like rooting for…I don’t even know. Enron? An internet start-up that spent all their venture capital on beanbag chairs and overpaying the Flaming Lips to play the launch party instead of working on a business plan and beta-testing the search engine? Even now, it’s like rooting for Donald Trump, who looks like a rich guy and who certainly acts like a rich guy but who, when you look more closely at the figures, is actually not nearly as good at getting rich as he’s led you to believe.

But mostly, it’s like rooting for…a baseball team. Finally. Not an empiiiiiire, not a dyyyyyynasty, not a proud tradiiiiition of blaaaaaah blah blah pinstripes blah. A baseball team. A mediocre baseball team with crappy fielding stats and a pitching staff so old that it’s basically retired-Mafiosi bocce with jockstraps. Except the retired Mafiosi throw harder. And in a way, it’s a relief, a welcome change, not because oh boo hoo winning all the time gets so tiresome dahhhling — as I’ve pointed out numerous times in the past couple of years, the Yankees haven’t hooked a Series ring since 2000, and winning the division title a bunch of times is great and all, but in the AL East, it’s not exactly dragon-caliber competition getting slain out there — but because I’ve seen it coming for a while now, the sucking. I can’t believe it took as long as it did to arrive.

Now that it’s here at last, I can relax and just enjoy the games. Well, not “relax,” exactly, Tom Gordon, or “enjoy,” sometimes, quite, TOM GORDON, but first of all, there is a difference between regular old garden-variety famous original lowercase-B baseball and [ceremonial trumpet break] hallowed Mom-and-apple-pie American-flag up-capped Yankee Baseball. What is that difference, you ask? Well, [ceremonial trumpet break] hallowed Mom-and-apple-pie American-flag up-capped Yankee Baseball is annoying, because now and then, those of us who follow the Yankees because it is local baseball that we got sucked into in the college TV room, and not because we think the Catholic Church should replace one of the Stations of the Cross with a statue of Thurman goddamn “JFK Jr. Is My Co-Pilot” Munson, would just like to watch nine innings without poor dead Lou Gehrig getting dragged into it like he personally shipped Alfonso Soriano to Texas. I mean, some of the fans must like that stuff, and every team has its mythology, and Baltimore fans must get sick to death of invocations of Earl Weaver, not to mention the Cincy fans all opening the paper every morning “please please no Big Red Machine puns please God pl– oh, Christ,” and then when a Reds fan goes out of town on business or something and the subject of Pete Rose comes up, and someone else at the table is all, “Where’re you from again?” and the Reds fan is like, “[kaff] …Pittsburgh.” You spend enough time as a Mets fan, comes the day you just really want to travel back in time and give Tug McGraw a Valium. But for me, watching the YES Network, it is just older than Colonel Ruppert by now, truly, to the point where I wish my remote had a “commercial auto-mute” function, because as if we haven’t suffered enough with the AFLAC ads and the aforementioned horrendously acted Subway spots, we also have to contend with The Clarinets of Portent announcing the next Yankee profile on Yankeeography, which I cannot watch, because narrator and local radio-broadcast annoyance John Sterling always sounds like either he’s about to start crying with the sheer joy of talking about Joe Pepitone, or he has an entire live pigeon wedged in his throat and it wants a lawyer.

It’s…Joe Pepitone. Not that he hasn’t led an interesting life, but where does the hagiography of every single person ever to wear a Yankee uniform end? Because “Yankeeography Presents ‘Chad Kreuter: A Life'” is where it’s heading, and I just can’t go there.

But when the team is losing and looking bad, a lot of that Joe DiMaggio, Inventor Of Fire stuff falls away — not from the YES Network, because pretending that the Reggie! Bar is a triumph of human endeavor is sort of their business model, but from watching the Yankees and rooting for them as a fan of the game. All the noise and pomp is gone, and you don’t have to deal with The Rivalry because everybody involved is either trying to catch up with the Jays, trying to figure out how Baltimore got a size-fourteen foot on the division’s neck, or both, and THANK GOD. The Red Sox won the World Series; we can barely win a ring toss with the pitching we’ve got; it’s irrelevant, and HALLELUJAH. Sure, now all the flapdoodling and kerfuffling is about Giambi not hitting, and how dare they take Bernie out of center, what’s wrong with Matsui, why doesn’t Torre pitch Quantrill more — the usual sports-media shrieking and wailing. But at least it’s about the team. It’s not about another team; it’s not about the history of the team; occasionally it’s about the cost of the team, which…seriously, and…yikes, but it’s about the team.

Unfortunately, the team is not very good in a lot of ways. The recent reversal of fortune is nice to see, but I don’t expect it to last. Tino can only keep the Mantle impersonation up for so long, and I adore Tino and would still adore him if he couldn’t get the ball out of the infield, so I love that he’s doing well, but unless they plan to haul Scotty Bro and Chuck Knoblauch out of mothballs for reunion tours at key moments during the season, which I actually endorse wholeheartedly, because Scott Brosius is my co-pilot, because he’s awesome, I just don’t see this outfit making the playoffs. I’ve said it for, like, four years; every year, the offense has covered the bleh pitching; it’s happening again now; this time, I don’t think the center is going to hold, because the center is older than dirt, and that’s a problem that should have gotten dealt with over the winter. Didn’t happen.

It’s hard to watch, at times. It’s hard to watch Kevin Brown serving up long balls. It’s hard to watch Bernie get yanked out of center, even though it’s the right move. It’s hard to hear Gordon getting booed when he put in so much good time last year. It’s hard to see how incapable the front office is of dealing with the Jason Giambi situation — and I really can’t say whether Giambi’s got anything left. It is my entirely unscientifically-arrived-at sense that, between going off the juice, dealing with last year’s health problems, and the mind-fucking scrutiny he’s under right now, the guy is done. More to the point, I’m kind of done. How many damn potential DHs do the Yanks need, anyway? Because if the point of the DH is to hit, and only to hit, and you ain’t hitting…? I just don’t want to hear about it anymore, really, everyone trying to figure out what’s wrong with him, because it doesn’t matter what’s wrong with him. Something is wrong with him, or at least not as “right” as what we paid for, and if he’s not getting it done, he’s not getting it done and enough already. The whole flap about whether he ought to go to the minors, the people who still keep pointing to his MVP season like that makes up for anything in the present day, grasping at straws all “oh, he’s good for a lot of walks”…it just bogs the whole team down, I think. I hesitate to say anything about influences in the clubhouse and divisiveness and whatever-all, because I don’t know what goes on, and these guys are professionals and so on, but I have to wonder how the constant drip-drip-drip-drip distraction of Giambi rumors and Giambi problems and Giambi testimony affects the rest of the team. As a fan, again, I could do without it, and I feel like Cashman might have looked harder for a way to release the guy, because it’s one thing to don your Captain Distracto cape and swoop around the sports pages if you can drive in runs. Don’t expect to get away with it if you can’t hit for shit. Drawing walks isn’t worthless, of course, but come on. You need to get wood on the ball more than once a week. He had a decent season in 2003, so it’s possible he’ll return to form; I have no idea. I guess we’ll see.

We’ll see, and we’ll raise holy hell in the peanut gallery, because if you can say anything positive about following and stupidly loving an assy team, it’s that an assy team is a very large and very shallow barrel full of gigantic fish, and making fun of it is a rocket launcher. Do I want Giambi to shut up and go away, sort of? Yes. Would I miss the symphony of impatience, disgust, rage, and despair that greets his plate appearances in bars across the five boroughs? Yes. Because it is hilarious. An incomplete sampling includes:

“Aaauuugggh!”
“Oh, that’s great. Thaaaaaat’s juuuuuust great.”
“Noooooooooo!”
“Ehhh-cccchhh.”
“Pffft.”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
[chimp noises]
“‘Rally killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa fa fa fa, fa fa fa fa fuck this.'”
“Bleh.”
“The pig-face store called. They’re out of him.”
[fashioning of noose from strap of girlfriend’s purse]

This is what happens when a team stinks up the joint. The play itself is going to suck. The trash-talking, however, is going to rule, and the worse the team is or the bigger the goat the player, the more awesome the heckling — sports bars in Denver must sound like a Dean Martin Celebrity Roast right now. I recently witnessed a fellow pub patron react to the announcement that Mike Stanton had entered the game by, I kid you not, screaming and running out of the bar while waving his hands around all Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Shrieked in terror; fled. I’m a Stanton defender; not the point. The point is that getting off a good line at the expense of a bad team is extremely satisfying. Sure, it’s “we laugh so that we may not weep” territory, but you can see Stottlemyre approaching the mound and sob, or you can try to time your ground-to-TV popcorn missile as well as possible. You can gaze upon the field in mute horror, or you can make up a drinking game around the phrase “past a diving Womack.”

Losing isn’t all that fun. It’s irritating, and it’s even more irritating that the ex-cellent managerial decisions I yell out from the couch never seem to penetrate the TV and take hold. But losing does have its amusements — rude nicknames, dramatic bellowing, graffiti-ing pictures of slumping players — and it’s nice when your team’s on a roll, but sometimes it’s just as rewarding to stab a back-page Post photo of Steinbrenner with a pen. Or so I’ve heard.

May 16, 2005

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