My Shameful Year as a Yankees Fan
You can’t choose your baseball team, and you can’t run from who you are.
Outdoor baseball, for me, was something that I only saw on TV, in old movies like The Natural or when the Twins played on the road. That changed when I was seventeen and visited New York City for the first time. I was due to leave on an American Field Service trip to Russia, and my parents and I booked a few days in the city to sight-see, visit colleges and go to a Yankees game before I got on a plane bound for Moscow.
We took the subway to the original Yankee Stadium, the one still haunted by legendary players like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, and settled in among the pinstriped fans to watch the game. It wasn’t just any Yankees team that took the field that afternoon, but the 2001 Yankees: Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter (who hadn’t yet aged out of heartthrob status). They were on a 95-win pace and closing in on a playoff berth.
When a foul ball flew into the stands and hit a kid sitting one row down from us, another fan grabbed it until the rest of the crowd started chanting, “Give the kid the ball!” The fan handed it over to the boy with the bloodied temple. Later on, the crowd encouraged another fan to throw back the opposing team’s homerun ball. Yankee fans had no qualms about razzing somebody if they wore the other team’s gear. The sky above the stadium was a bright late-summer blue and sunlight pooled around the players in the outfield.
The history, the animated crowds and the sunshine that bathed the grass at Yankee Stadium all contrasted sharply with baseball as I was used to seeing it. In 2001, the Minnesota Twins were still playing in the Metrodome, an indoor stadium with fluorescent lights, fake grass and a white roof that was like being inside the Michelin Man. A wall of folded-up seats in the outfield that would remain unused until the Vikings season began made the park feel a bit like a supply closet. Along the third baseline, a giant Kemps milk jug sat in the stands. It was supposed to light up whenever the Twins hit a home run. I remember it staying dark a lot of the time. Crowds did not throw back home run balls or come together to make sure injured kids went home with souvenirs.
I’ve been a Twins fan all my life. One of my earliest memories is attending a World Series victory parade in ‘87. My second-grade journal was full of entries about Dan Gladden, Kirby Puckett, Rick Aguilera and the rest of the ‘91 Twins as they went on to win another championship. But as I got older, the Twins’ prospects grew bleaker. In ‘95, the Twins finished the season 44 games out of first place. In ‘96, Kirby Puckett developed glaucoma and had to retire. The team had losing records in ‘97, ‘98 and ‘99. By 2001, the Twins were turning things around, but they still finished six games out of first place.
That day at Yankee Stadium, the home team won. Outdoor baseball, raucous fans, New York City, and on-field dominance all combined to seduce me into changing my allegiance.
In the fall of 2001, the World Series was postponed due to the attacks on the World Trade Center. When the Fall Classic, which had been pushed to late October, finally began, the Yankees were in it. It was impossible to ignore the symbolism; Game 6 of the World Series took place on November 3rd, 2001. Just one day prior, New York City firefighters protested plans to reduce their presence at Ground Zero; they had a right to keep searching for their fallen colleagues, they argued.
Even people who had hated the Yankees all their lives donned pinstripes for that series. I cheered on the Yankees for all seven games. I still remember the image of Derek Jeter alone in the dugout, staring blankly into the outfield after the Diamondbacks walked them off in Game 7.
When spring rolled around, I followed the Yankees as best I could, scouring the paper every day for the previous night’s boxscores. Sometime in the summer, the Yankees came to town and swept the Twins. I celebrated. In a few short weeks, I’d start college in New York. The Yankees were a symbol of the future I saw for myself.
During my first week at Sarah Lawrence, there was a sign-up sheet to go to a Yankees game. I put my name down, and a van took a group of us from Bronxville to the Bronx. The Yankees played Boston that day, three years before the Red Sox would finally break their curse. New York fans taunted them with chants of “1918!” never letting them forget for a moment their multi-decade World Series drought.
“Why don’t you leave now?” One Yankee fan said to a man in Red Sox gear. “Beat the traffic.”
The Yankees won.
In the van on the way back to campus, I met the boy I would date on and off all through the next year. For Christmas, I considered buying us tickets to the Yankees home opener. My boyfriend insisted on paying me back for them because exchanging gifts would have meant commitment or something. But I had an additional reason to want those tickets: The Yankees were playing the Twins.
While we stood in line to get into the stadium, I tried to loop my arm through his and he wouldn’t let me, grumbling about how he hated public affection. We took our seats in the bleachers and in front of us were two men in Minnesota gear. A switch flipped in my brain when I saw them. Those are your people.
All of the entries in my second-grade diary, all of the games I’d listened to on the radio at the cabin up north, all of the years I’d spent rooting for the Twins even when they were hopeless all roared to life.
The Twins lost the game, and after the last out in the 9th inning, my boyfriend high-fived me. “Why are you high-fiving me?” I thought. “My team just lost.” My year as a Yankees fan was over, just like that.
After the game, while we waited for a train back to campus, my boyfriend announced that he had to pee and walked to the end of the platform to relieve himself. He returned with a glistening shoe and I pretended not to notice. (Note to my younger self: He just pissed all over his foot and that’s not even the grossest thing about him. Dump his ass, now!)
Many things changed after that early spring game in the Bronx. To my eternal regret, the shoe-pisser dumped me before I realized I was out of his league. I went abroad during my junior year, spending the fall in Moscow and the spring in the United Kingdom. I graduated and moved to Astoria, Queens where I warmed to the Mets. I never became a full-fledged Mets fan, but I found common ground with Mets fans who resented the Yankees and the “spoiled brats” who loved them.
By 2011, I’d been back in Minnesota for several years. The Twins’ days of playing inside a “giant inflatable toilet” were over. The Target Field era had begun. Since then, the team has been up and down, and many fans, myself included, remain frustrated with billionaire owners who refuse to invest in the team. But win or lose, no other team can bring me up (or bring me down after a bad loss) like the Twins can.
Last season, the Twins won a season series against the Yankees for the first time in decades. Fans thought maybe, like the Red Sox, the Twins had broken their curse. We were deflated this year when they reverted to their old ways of laying down when NYY is on the scoreboard. Twins fans all too often let out-of-towners take over the stadium in a way Yankee fans would never allow on their home turf.
I can’t help but wonder whether I am, in some small way, partly to blame for this curse. I spent a year cheering for the wrong team and now the gods of baseball are punishing me. Hasn’t it been long enough? I renounced in 2003. Two decades should suffice, o vengeful spirits! I have one Yankees cap that I never wear, an old sweatshirt and a Paul O’Neill bobblehead. Would it help if I burned them in the backyard? Because I’ll do it. I’m sorry I was dazzled by pinstripes. I’ll never let that happen again.
People say you can’t choose your baseball team, and it’s true. When you become a fan at a young age, the team just becomes a part of who you are. No matter how hard you try, you cannot run from who you are, so you might as well embrace it, whether you come out on top or find yourself 44 games back.