My Life and Times...

Next week is the start of the baseball playoffs, and millions of people who haven’t seen a single baseball game all year suddenly become either rapid Yankee fans or Yankee-haters. Sometimes it seems as if those are the only two types of baseball fans in the country.

I grew up as a Yankee fan, and I think I know why. My first baseball memory was at the age of 7 when I saw my grandfather watching a baseball game. It was the last game of the World Series when the Brooklyn Dodgers upset the New York Yankees and won their first world championship ever. Having always been an underdog myself, I naturally took pity on the poor Yankees (not realizing they were in the midst of 14 world series and 9 championships in the first 16 years of my life) and rooted for them from then on.

Had my first baseball memory occurred a year later, when the Yankees got their revenge on the Dodgers, I might have become a Brooklyn Dodger fan instead, only to have my heart broken two years later when they abandoned New York for Los Angeles.

In a way, a person’s life is a progression of the athletes they rooted for. While I never really had any sports heroes–reserving that lofty position for writers and rock musicians–I did like a lot of Yankees:

● the 1960s dynasty with Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra;
● the 1970s of Ron Guidry, Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson.
● the 1980s, a decade when they did not win any world championships as their intrusive owner George Steinbrenner forced them to trade all their promising youngsters for over-the-hill veterans, so that they mostly came in 2nd place through much of the decade. This was after Steinbrenner held his first news conference as Yankee owner in 1973 by proclaiming that he knew a lot about shipbuilding, but nothing about baseball, so he would be a hands-off owner. Still there were stars such as Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield and Willie Randolph;
● the 1990s dynasty of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Paul O’Neil.

It remains to be seen whether this current team will match the above teams which won multiple world championships, or whether last year was a one-year spike.