that strangely tender malice, at once so delicious and yet so purifying
July 15, 2018 9:45 PM   Subscribe

The New York Yankees Are a Moral Abomination: "Soberly considered, the New York Yankees and their fans present a moral dilemma. Our consciences, naturally abhorring everything abominable, tell us that such things simply ought not exist. And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we would not really want eradicated. " (SLNYT by David Bentley Hart)
posted by crazy with stars (44 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
And yet we also know that the evil they represent is one we would not really want eradicated.

Of course not.

That's the Giants.
posted by Celsius1414 at 9:46 PM on July 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


HP Lovecraft, sportswriter.

The worst thing about the Yankees is how their existence allows Red Sox fans to persist in thinking themselves underdogs.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:23 PM on July 15, 2018 [34 favorites]


Celsius1414, possibly unknown to you, but the Yomiuri Giants are, generally speaking, regarded as NPB's Yankees. So yes!

just instinctive revulsion before something obscene, like the goat-headed god of the diabolists.

now hang on, I have nothing more against that god than I do any other
posted by mwhybark at 10:31 PM on July 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


The worst thing about the Yankees is how their existence allows Red Sox fans to persist in thinking themselves underdogs.

There are reasons I've been a lifelong Mets fan, among them:

#1 No matter how shitty a day I'm having, the Mets are having a worse one.

Now THAT'S an underdog!
posted by mikelieman at 10:44 PM on July 15, 2018 [14 favorites]


HP Lovecraft, sportswriter.

a short story where the Golden State Warriors slowly transform from beloved hometown underdogs to a manifestation of Bay Area hyper-optimized superhumanity
posted by Apocryphon at 11:03 PM on July 15, 2018 [15 favorites]


And yet we also know that the evil they represent

Bill Lee knows where it's at in that regard.
posted by philip-random at 12:07 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


HP Lovecraft, sportswriter.

a short story where the Golden State Warriors slowly transform from beloved hometown underdogs to a manifestation of Bay Area hyper-optimized superhumanity

Non-euclidian geometry, tentacles, and bizzare fungi from Yuggoth would make all sporting events much more exciting.

The shoggoth shoots! He scores!
posted by Going To Maine at 12:35 AM on July 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


Counterpoint: HERE COMES THE JUDGE
posted by R.F.Simpson at 12:35 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


> the Yomiuri Giants are, generally speaking, regarded as NPB's Yankees.

And yet while they are indeed referred to this way often, and they are indeed the biggest, richest, best-known team from the country's iconic metropolis, the actual relationship of Japanese baseball fans to the Yomiuri Giants is completely unlike the USA version of the same dynamic.

In America, you are either a Yankees fan or the fan of some other team, in which case you almost certainly hate the Yankees in a way you do not feel about other teams. You're very unlikely to be indifferent toward them.

In Japan, you may be a Giants fan, or you may be a fan of some other team, such as the Swallows or Carp. In that case, however, you are very likely also a Giants fan, because they are in so many ways seen as the de facto national team. So you cheer for both your own Swallows and Japan's Own Giants, and when the two meet in combat, you turn fully, completely, stereotypically Japanese by shyly cheering for your "real" team while also fully expecting to lose, though not really minding, since there of course no shame in losing to the mighty Giants, Japan's finest team.

This attitude has been in place for all recorded history, as far as I can tell, and has little to do with the talent or year-to-year on-field performance of the Tokyo team.

So I suppose in that they occupy a strange, special emotional space, unlike any other team in their league... yes, the Giants are exactly like the Yankees.

PS: Go, go Mets! (and also Giants)
posted by rokusan at 1:14 AM on July 16, 2018 [14 favorites]


Soberly considered

Well, there's your problem.

Go Giants! (I have seen that said a couple of times in this thread. I hope we're all talking about the same lovable orange & black combination from the western shores)
posted by chavenet at 1:34 AM on July 16, 2018


or you may be a fan of some other team, such as the Swallows or Carp. In that case, however, you are very likely also a Giants fan, because they are in so many ways seen as the de facto national team

Rokusan, you and I must move in very different circles. (I commend to you the horrified reaction of a friend who showed up to rehearsal one Sunday in a bright orange T-shirt when he was told "Oh my God, you look like a Giants fan.") Would most Japanese people cheer for the (Yomiuri) Giants if they were playing the Yankees? Yes, almost certainly. Would most of them "not really mind" if their own team loses to the Giants? Um...maybe don't say so too loudly near Koshien Stadium, where the Tigers are playing the f'ing Kyojin at this very minute. I think any views held of the Giants as "Japan's finest team" (on average, anyway, not in a year where they really do happen to be superb) are a geography-limited phenomenon.

(Personally I figure a Mets fan should cheer for the Swallows, since they are obviously the exact parallel, but maybe that's just me and my fond memories of Atsuya Furuta. :) )

(OP, sorry to drag this thread so far onto the wrong side of the Pacific...thanks for posting!)
posted by huimangm at 2:40 AM on July 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


In my household they are simply referred to as “the much-hated New York Yankees.”
posted by grimjeer at 3:52 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


....Okay, I'm a Red Sox fan and even I thought this was a little over-the-top.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:34 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Finding out that somebody is a Yankee fan is a little bit like finding out that they vote Republican or don't like dogs: a pretty strong indication that something is wrong inside that probably can't be fixed.

Though, truth be told, I would blame them for both if I could.

... I might be able to.
posted by uncleozzy at 4:50 AM on July 16, 2018 [9 favorites]


In Japan, you may be a Giants fan, or you may be a fan of some other team, such as the Swallows or Carp. In that case, however, you are very likely also a Giants fan, because they are in so many ways seen as the de facto national team.

yeah, um, don't try that in osaka. hanshin tigers all the way.
posted by emmling at 5:07 AM on July 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I don't hate the Yankees and I'm a Phillies fan. Yankees fans, on the other hand, often make the trip to Philadelphia simply to represent their invading and soulless juggernaut, and I abhor them.
posted by Peach at 5:08 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'd argue that the Red Sox run of success over the last 14 years has completely eliminated that perennial underdog mindset. In some ways, it's affected my fandom, as it was sort of built on that underdog mindset. I don't live in Boston so I don't know the vibe up there, but in talking to family still in the area I get the sense I'm not particularly unique in this regard. I wrote about this a couple of years ago.
posted by COD at 5:09 AM on July 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


Re the fans from the piece: "it is not everything grotesquely strange about them that terrifies us, but rather everything that is all too familiar. We may fear becoming like them; our greater fear, however, is of discovering that we already are."
Since the author is an Orioles fan, I can only speculate that their fandom is not like that of the Phillies supporter, who acknowledges happily that the home team stinks, and even if it doesn't it will disappoint us.
posted by Peach at 5:43 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Every large sports franchise should be owned by the city it operates in - we paid for those stations and the blight that surrounds them - I’d feel a lot better buying a 14$ bud light if I knew some of the money was going to after school programs or bike lane infrastructure rather then directly inti the khaki pockets of whatever boiled ham with a coke program happens to claim ownership that month.
posted by The Whelk at 5:47 AM on July 16, 2018 [26 favorites]


> I'm a Red Sox fan and even I thought this was a little over-the-top.

I'm a Mets fan (former Washington Senators fan) and I thought this was spot on.

> I'd argue that the Red Sox run of success over the last 14 years has completely eliminated that perennial underdog mindset.

Yup. My grandson, born in 2004, takes it for granted that the Sox (his team, despite his parents being Yankee fans, god help them) are natural winners.
posted by languagehat at 5:57 AM on July 16, 2018


The author sure did point out, many times, how clearly not envious he is. I believe him.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:19 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'd argue that the Red Sox run of success over the last 14 years has completely eliminated that perennial underdog mindset.

Same here. Not after their win in 2004, but after 2007 they became, in my mind, just another good team. The curse was a large part of the mythology and appeal.
posted by gauche at 6:35 AM on July 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have resurrected the tag I used back in the Jeter years: Antichrists of Baseball (TM)
posted by Ber at 6:43 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


The persistence of the New York Yankees is the second biggest reason the National League is vastly better than the American. (Both of my favorite teams play in the American League; it isn't their fault they play in the inferior league.)
posted by bukvich at 7:24 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Is this a new expansion for Darkest Dungeon?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:25 AM on July 16, 2018


Ironically, the current Yankees are built more from the ground up than any Yankee team in my living memory (or at least my adult living memory). They have actual young prospects that they developed themselves, instead of signing all the best free agents like they're ordering off a menu. They actually have only the eighth-highest payroll in baseball, instead of their usual highest.

Nowadays, it's the Red Sox who seem to be attempting to bludgeon the rest of baseball with their wallet - they can afford to treat $50 million plus of financial mistakes (Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Rusney Castillo) as if they were a rounding error.

Mind you, the Yankees can still effortlessly afford to pay Giancarlo Stanton $25 million plus per year until 2027. Virtually nobody else can do that.

Disclaimer: I am a Blue Jays fan, so I say a plague on all their houses.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 7:27 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


Wow. Such shoddy work by the NYT. The writer has obviously mistaken baseball for football and misspelled "New England Patriots".
posted by Thorzdad at 8:07 AM on July 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


"Ironically, the current Yankees are built more from the ground up than any Yankee team in my living memory (or at least my adult living memory). They have actual young prospects that they developed themselves, instead of signing all the best free agents"

This is just another reason to hate them. First they build a juggernaut one way, and then, when criticized for the way they built it, they go and build a new one the other way just because they can. It's like challenging a pitcher to throw with his off hand, only for him to strike you out again. Nothing more frustrating.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:23 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't know how a (fellow) O's fan has time to hate on the Yankees when there's so much shade to be thrown right here at home.
posted by HumanComplex at 8:25 AM on July 16, 2018


So the author is a fan of the Orioles and is complaining that the Yankees are representative of American decline and therefore should be hated?

The Orioles, the team that refuses to adopt modern methods of evaluation, run as personal toy by an owner clearly unable to meet the basic demands of the business, handing out contracts to the undeserving who are then not able to come remotely close to matching even average production for their positions, a team that had to resort to rule 5 pick ups and paying the Yankees for relievers that the Yanks couldn't fit on their roster, making a significant part of the Orioles team players who weren't seen as good enough to be kept by competent teams. Those Orioles are somehow more worthy of rooting for and less like the current US than the competently run Yankees?

I think fandom must have a corrosive effect on people's mentality. The Orioles should be hated for being a horribly managed vanity project, the Yankees should be admired for how they put this team together and how they moved past their years of horrible mismanagement and dreadful ownership. But since fandom comes first, I guess it makes sense to hate those who are good at something instead of doubting your own loyalties.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:36 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


So I’m off to read the article, and I feel like I’m about to rain on everyone’s happy Yankee hating parade, but as a native New Yorker there’s an aspect of this that I never see acknowledged and it’s weird and creepy:

Mets and Jets fans are overwhelmingly white (and sad, because they are Mets and Jets fans).

Yankees fans are not.

This is...noticeable. Like even as a white person this is hella obvious if you went to games. (Or at least was for the first 20 or so years of my life (all spent in NYC), which is probably the last time I paid attention to baseball beyond wondering whether Red Sox fans were going to riot again.)

So. I always kind of raise my eyebrow at visceral Yankee hatred, and I’ve always wondered how this has influenced the sports media’s coverage. It would be kind of weird if this was the one area where this wasn’t a thing.

Disclosure: the Yankees are my team, to the extent that I care (which is not a lot), because childhood.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:55 AM on July 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


Mets and Jets fans are overwhelmingly white (and sad, because they are Mets and Jets fans).

I go to several Mets games per year and I can report that there are substantial numbers of nonwhite Mets fans. Also, the Yankees persisted in the the post-9/11 trend of playing God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch for years after the Mets - and every other team - stopped doing it, which drives me absolutely bonkers.*

In any event, after a lifetime of closely following baseball in NYC I can quite confidently tell you that there is no particular association with the Yankees and nonwhite fans and never has been and that this is not the reason why (some - ever read the Daily News?) sports media hates the Yankees. Sports media hates the Yankees because they are the Yankees. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

*I was a Mets game earlier this year where it happened, but that's the first time I've seen it since probably 2004. I don't know why and I spent most of the next inning ranting to my cousin about how we should just stop playing patriotic songs at sporting events that do not involve international competition.
posted by breakin' the law at 9:39 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hmmm. I mean, ok. Growing up in NYC it was...very noticeable to me, to the extent it made me uncomfortable as a teenager, even before I had learned to regularly question these things. Through the years I've met other people who've had similar experiences, so I know it's not just me, but I can respect that that hasn't been your experience.
posted by schadenfrau at 9:45 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm not a big baseball fan, but I do live in Inwood (neighborhood north of Washington Heights, for people who don't know it), and at least within NYC city limits, schadenfrau's got something. I don't so much know that Mets fans are white, but in Upper Manhattan, north of 96th, say, the Yankees are the neighborhood team and the fans are Dominican and other Latinx, and the same in the Bronx.

So, I accept that from outside the city the Yankees are an evil juggernaut, but if you grew up walking distance from the stadium, you're probably not white and you're almost certainly a Yankees fan, and that makes me like them as my neighborhood team.
posted by LizardBreath at 10:23 AM on July 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


(Also, I was flukily at a Mets game about a month ago, and they played God Bless America at the seventh inning stretch. Weirdly, people stood and put their hands over their hearts -- it's not the anthem, guys!)
posted by LizardBreath at 10:24 AM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is why I chortle whenever I hear anyone cursing the Patriots. It's a "ah, you finally have had the revelation. Good for you." After all, the Patriots (and I say this as a proud Masshole, at least when it comes to sports) are the Yankees of the NFL. Hated, evil, but somehow seductive. And the joy that people feel when they get their comeupance is just as delightful for them.

In all honesty, after 2007, my feelings about the Yankees cooled. I hate them now less with the fiery burning of a thousand suns, than with a gentle feeling that a saint feels towards the poor devils who have no claim on him.

Maybe I've just lived in New York City for long enough for the corruption to take route.

(Yes, I will, if pressed, admit that Boston's habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the 90s was as much a product of how the Red Sox ran things than they Yankees, but sports fandom (at least city to city- I am much more subdued when it comes to the World Cup or Olympics, as the parent organizations are the actual evil there) has always been to me about hyperbolic declarations about the battle of good vs. evil the would make a Puritan minsters proud.)

That all said, I did really enjoy this, and viewed it as appropriately over the top.
posted by Hactar at 11:05 AM on July 16, 2018


Schadenfrau wrote: "So I’m off to read the article, and I feel like I’m about to rain on everyone’s happy Yankee hating parade, but as a native New Yorker there’s an aspect of this that I never see acknowledged and it’s weird and creepy: Mets and Jets fans are overwhelmingly white (and sad, because they are Mets and Jets fans). Yankees fans are not."

I will say that as a non-New-York-City New Yorker -- Rochester may be a craphole, but it's indisputably New York State -- while that's a surprise, it doesn't change my own Yankees hate.

Per the Iron Yet Unwritten Laws of Sports Fandom, it's okay for people to root for any franchise from their home area. If you're actually from NYC or the immediate vicinity, you can root for the Yankees if you must. If you must. One can forgive locals their love of a team, regardless of its objective status as a monument to Pure Evil, because it's their home.

It's the Yankees fans everywhere else who suck the effluvia from octopus anuses and mark Yankee Fandom as the refuge of jerkasses nationwide.

Go to an Orioles game or a Tigers game or any other team's games when the Yanks are in town and watch what sorts of nightmarish id monsters clog the stands with their navy caps and nigh-impossible fan entitlement. Yeeg. Perhaps there are a few kind and decent people among them; the world is vast and contains much that surprises. But experience has taught me not to hope overmuch for such things. And for what it's worth, these fans are mostly white. They also make one despair for humanity.

Buncha front-runnin' bastards. Grow some goddamn character, why doncha.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 11:48 AM on July 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


“Fucking Yankees, Reports Nation,” The Onion, 16 August 2007
Moments after the New York Yankees continued a month-long stretch that has seen them climb from the bottom of the AL East to pull within a once unfathomable four games of the first-place Red Sox by defeating the Baltimore Orioles Monday night, stunned and enraged baseball fans across America took a moment to shake their heads in disbelief and curse dejectedly at the relentless inevitability of Yankee glory.

"Fucking Yankees," said Marshfield, MA resident and longtime Red Sox fan Lawrence Broberg, echoing the sentiments of thousands of men and woman across the nation. "Every year. Every goddamn year."
posted by ob1quixote at 12:30 PM on July 16, 2018 [5 favorites]


The only major league baseball game I remember going to with my father was at the old Exhibition Stadium - the Toronto Blue Jays versus the Yankees.

The Yankees won.

I hate the Yankees.

I like the Giants - and the Dodgers - but only when they were in New York.
posted by jb at 4:18 PM on July 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


This was a problem when I lived on Long Island. Being of sound mind, of course I hated the Yankees, but I loved old Yankee Stadium. What a magnificent thing it was. Now it's gone, and my problem is solved, plus now I live in Maryland and like Camden Yards.
posted by acrasis at 6:03 PM on July 16, 2018


Also, the Yankees persisted in the the post-9/11 trend of playing God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch for years after the Mets - and every other team - stopped doing it, which drives me absolutely bonkers.*

I regret to report that the Mariners play it at the stretch on Sundays at least, and it drives me bananas. I loudly fantasize about how it would be much better if they replaced it with "This Land is Your Land."
posted by mwhybark at 6:07 PM on July 16, 2018


One of the greatest sportstimes of my life was watching the Tigers shutout the Yankees in a bar on the Upper East Side full of sad dbags. I was with my bf at the time — himself a Michiganian — and cheering loudly each time a new Yankee was struck out filled my soul.

But as a Lakers fan (originally from LA), I also understand the life of a Yankee fan.
posted by dame at 5:57 AM on July 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


You guys, my four-year-old went to preschool today wearing a Mets shirt for "team day" and wrote her name in the "Yankees" column on the "favorite baseball team" chart.

I am beside myself. I don't know what to do.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:14 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, don't disown her without giving her a serious talk first and a chance to mend her ways. She's still malleable.
posted by languagehat at 1:55 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


« Older Why functional programming? Why Haskell?   |   Their sorrows in the present instance are also our... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments