There is no logic when it comes to the reasons why a person becomes a fan of a particular sports team. It's all mixed up in tribalism and emotions, two factors I wouldn't want to see the world run by, but okay when it comes to sports team loyalties. (You might as well expend these unpleasant human tendencies on something like sports and hopefully leave them out of more serious stuff like, say, global politics.)
Me? I am a New York Yankees fan. Over the years, I have had numerous people try to convince me it was wrong for me to be one, from kids in high school to adult friends who try to talk logically to me, arguing about how terrible the Yankees are for baseball, how awful their fans are, how they cheat by "buying" championships, etc. What's the point? Why speak logic to something that is in itself inherently illogical: rooting for a team in which you have no real vested interest, in an activity that has no actual bearing on your greater reality? (Unless you bet on sports, which is another story.)
(You want to ask me who ruined baseball?
Bill James , who created the cult of statistical analysis and ruined many a fine and irrational baseball fan, and whose adulation lead to such atrocities as fantasy league baseball, in which fans care less about their real life favorite team, and switch their loyalties to and the even more irrational worship of their totally make believe team. But I digress.)
The subject of baseball fan loyalties came up recently when I was talking to my brother Victor, following a recent and excellent
HBO documentary on the Brooklyn Dodgers. "Do you realize," my brother conjectured, "that if our father didn't happen to be a Yankee fan, we'd probably be Mets fans today?" And he's absolutely right. We grew up in Queens, surrounded by Mets fans. We never really knew my father's side of the family—most of the relatives we interacted with growing up were from my mom's side of the family, and the majority of them lived in or had roots in Brooklyn. They had all been Dodger fans. When the Dodgers left Brooklyn, they were without a team for some time. But when the New York Mets were established, playing in the same league as the Dodgers and presenting the only alternative to the hated Yankees, they all became instant Mets fans. As did their children.
I attended high school in Brooklyn, and it was the same thing: a handful of Yankee fans and me, surrounded by mocking Mets fans. And you have to understand: this was at a time when the Yankees really were a crap team, usually finishing around 4th place, and the Mets were always in contention.
I don't know why our dad was a Yankees fan, but he was. My brother Victor a few years older than me, lived and died for the Yankees. I didn't get into baseball until my teens, which is considered unusually late. But when I did, I was pretty much programmed to be a Yankees fan. The peak of my baseball worshipping days came during the 70s, a decade that began with the Yankees being mediocre and playing in the Mets shadow, but which ended with three pennants and two World Series. (And how I always hated the fact that this happened after I left high school and couldn't gloat about it to the Mets fans.)
The audio commentary to those years—when I lived and died for the Yankees—was provided by Phil Rizzuto. I had heard from my Dad and some of my uncles (the latter, grudgingly) what a great shortstop he had been for the Yankees in the 40s and 50s. But to me, he was the voice of the Yankees in the broadcast booth. During this time, the Yankee TV and radio crew was Phil, former St. Louis Cardinal great (and future National League President) Bill White, and veteran announcer Frank Messer. Every sports fan has their favorite home team announcers, and like rooting for the team, the criteria is completely subjective. Usually, it's an opinion completely biased by nostalgia, attached to the guys you were hearing during presumably more innocent times, growing up.
Really, I am sure as I got a little older, I probably got a little more cynical towards Phil, one of the guys whose job it was to presumably be objective, but who obviously rooted for the home team, and spent a lot of time spinning folksy, old-timey stories about the good old days, and used expressions like "Holy Cow" and "Huckleberry." I came to regard White as the pro in the booth, the ex-ballplayer who was more calm and objective in his commentary, and to see Rizzuto as more comic relief. We used to make fun of him for the TV commercials he did for a loan company called "The Money Store."
And then I got a little older, and left New York for Philadelphia, where I was only able to follow the Yankees by reading the box scores in the paper the next day. (This was quite some time before the internet, and cable, such as it was, was largely unavailable in my part of the city.) Occasionally, if I jiggled the antennae on my radio just right, I could pick up part of a game out of New York. With the exception of tracking the blossoming career of Don Mattingly, my Yankee fandom mostly went into remission and my personal investment in baseball largely went out around 1986 when the hated Mets defeated the almost equally hated Red Sox in the World Series.
In the early 90s, I found myself working in New York again. The last time I saw the Yankees actually play in Yankee Stadium was in 1992, when I went to a game (I think it might have been opening day) with—ironically enough—my friend
Tom Peyer . I say ironically, because Tom went on not long afterwards to author (with Hart Seely) the book called
O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, a collection of some of Rizzuto's stream of consciousness ramblings in the broadcast booth, presented as
found poetry . (Tom and Hart's book even
gets a mention in the Rizzuto obituary appearing on the Yankees website today.)
When the Yankees came back to even greater glory in the late 90s, I was watching it unfold on national TV, this time from California. I really had no idea who was covering the Yankees for the home crowd at that time. Somehow, maybe during one of my trips back east, I heard one of the games covered by
John Sterling. I remembered Sterling from back in the 70s as a very intelligent host of a sports radio show on WMCA, at a time when the words "intelligence" and "sports" were generally not used together. But as announcer of games, he seemed like he had become a bit of a clown to me, trying to hard to come up with clever catch phrases. (Why in the world would you emphasize the word "The" when shouting "The Yankees Win" at the end of every victory?) Sterling's act sounded forced to me, whereas the one thing you could say about Rizzuto was that he was genuine.
Today, I dismiss the more cynical, younger me, trying to introduce logic into baseball and rationalizing why should one judge harshly Phil Rizzuto's skills as an announcer. I willingly turn myself over to the misty haze of nostalgia, that fuzzes your view of the past and makes it all seem like everything was so much better back then. And I wish I was listening to one of those mid-seventies Yankee games right about now.
Rest in peace, Scooter.