And there’s good reason why the Broadway play was called “Damn Yankees” and not, say, “Damn White Sox.” They may not be, as someone who was not Ronald Reagan once declared, an “evil empire.” To an overwhelming majority of baseball fans, though, they’re as unlovable as a roomful of lawyers, bankers or journalists. A corporation that owes all those World Series victories to financial might as much as to athletic skill.
Which is what makes the story of Mariano Rivera so conflicting.
After 19 seasons as a pitcher for Yankees, Rivera is retiring at the end of this season. His career has been stellar, automatic Hall of Fame material. And he’s capping it off with what The New York Times in a front page story headlined “His Goodbye Tour.”
In each city where his team plays, he’s arranged to meet with people behind the baseball scenes. Secretaries. Custodians. Press box employees. And fans — not the ones in the luxury boxes, but the ones whose budgets only qualify for the bleacher seats. Few of the those he invites are Yankee fans. Most are Yankee haters.
Before taking the field, he sits in a private room with them, fans and haters alike, and just chats. Asking about their lives, their families, their interests.
In Cleveland, he made a special point of inviting John Adams, who may be the most annoying fan in the entire sports universe. During each Indians game, Adams stands in the top row of Cleveland’s stadium, banging on a drum with migraine-inducing monotony. But after meeting with Rivera, even Adams was conflicted.
“Of course I hate the Yankees,” he said. “I guess you could say Mariano is a special case.”
I don’t mean to oversell this. What Rivera is doing isn’t in a league with sweating in a homeless shelter serving food to the hungry, or spending off-seasons in a third world country bringing succor to hurricane victims. Still, it’s a welcome counterpoint to all those reports of mega-million dollar contracts and accusations about who’s injecting what drug into what body part.
So maybe I should rethink this Yankee-hating thing. Perhaps I could cut them a little slack and concede that they aren’t all evil, after all. That they can be a class act and that …
Nah, fuggedaboudit. I still hate ’em.
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