Bob Costas Was Right Not to Apologize Or Why Yankees Fans Think The World Revolves Around them

 

 

Around December of last year, I began an extended article that would become a recurring series stating that perhaps the most obvious reasons the rest of country hates New York is because of the Yankees and the elitist nature of New York critics. I’ve spent much of the last year explaining in great detail the fundamental flaw in the thinking of far too many critics. Even when I began writing about baseball earlier this months, I intended to leave the Yankees out of it, despite the fact I have felt infinitely more empathy for those who hate the Yankees than those who hate critics. Someone in my family is a die-hard Yankee fan, and despite our disagreements about nearly every aspect of Yankee fandom and what it has put me through over the last quarter of a century, I have let it pass because I do not wish to harm their feelings.

But earlier last week, there was a lot of uproar involving a sports figure that I’ve admired personally since I was growing up and since the main reason he seems to be taking flak from a certain sector of the media is directly because of the Yankees – or to be more accurate, Yankee fandom, I feel obligated to reply because it encapsulates at its core the arrogance of the Yankee fan and everything the Yankees represent. All sensitive Yankee fans – which I know from personal experience is all of them – might want to stop reading now.

Earlier this year I wrote an extensive column expressed my admiration for Bob Costas, a no-nonsense sports announcer who has fundamentally more principles than most people who have the job. He stopped announcing football games at NBC years ago because he refused to take part in an organization that refused to acknowledge the danger all of his participants were facing just for playing. Earlier this year, he resumed a monthly show on HBO in which he addressed major issues in sports and continued to demonstrate that he pulls no punches, whether it be with the hypocrisy of the Olympics or how college sports continues to exploit its recruits. And while he has always loved baseball beyond a passion, he has never been blind to its flaws. He was one of the few media personalities, who when the steroid era was at its peak, dared to burst suggesting the home runs that were being hit prodigiously might be a product of it. He took backlash for it at the time.

Costas has rarely gotten the opportunity – ever since Fox essentially took over the broadcast of the MLB postseason – to announce for a sport he has always loved. So like many, I was delighted to learn that he would be broadcasting the American League Division Series for TBS two weeks ago. Costas has always been more perfectly suited for baseball than any other sport, and I’ve missed hearing him broadcast it for years. Many others expressed similar gratitude – though perhaps we should have been forewarned when one in particular said: “I remember the 1990s when he was broadcasting the Yankees in the postseason.”

Costas has been the subject of some controversy during the series, and strangely enough, most of it isn’t because he lowered himself to do a shameless plug for HBO’s House of the Dragon during the seventh inning stretch of Game 1. (By this point, Bob knows that every sportscaster has to shill something during the return from the commercial.) No Costas’ fundamental flaw was that during this series, he chose to be pro-baseball rather than pro-Yankee. He dared suggest that Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs this year were not the ‘real’ home run record, going against the narrative that the New York press has been using. He spent too much of his time admiring the play of Cleveland and the problems they’ve had reaching the World Series over time. (I’m going to get back to that in a minute.) And worst of all, he thought that a series going to five games would be better for baseball rather than was what best for the Yankees, which was obvious to sweep. I assume they’re also pissed that he didn’t spend an adequate amount of time talking about the great season of Yankees during the Cleveland innings or making absurd home run calls every time a Yankee hit a homer.

I shouldn’t have to state the obvious: that TBS is not, last I checked, a local Yankee affiliate and that they were covering the American League Division Series, not Yankees road to October. But the thing is, I actually do because having lived my entire adult life with a Yankee fan, I know they are incapable of separating Yankees from baseball. The New York media does everything in its power to amplify this fact, even at the expense of the Mets. This is true even on the rare occasion when the Mets are doing well and the Yankees are flailing. It also fits into the narrative that what is good for the Yankees is also the best thing for baseball, which flies in the face of the entire history of the Yankees.

 I have never believed for a moment in the idea that the Yankee nation extends to all of baseball, including the National League. Yankee hating has been going on far longer than that – people have been crying ‘Break up the Yankees’ since at least the 1930s – and I find  hard to believe that the Yankees have ever been the most loved team in their own state. The Brooklyn Dodgers are fondly remembered more than sixty years after they left Brooklyn, because so much of their history was tied up in losing to the Yankees. The whole reason the Mets had more fans than the Yankees even when they were losing over one hundred games a season was because, importantly, they weren’t the Yankees. There’s an exceptionally good chance that baseball was struggling so badly in the 1950s, because of the Yankees’ dominance – how much fun could it have been for a Boston or a Detroit fan if every year the Yankees were winning? Every argues that dynasties and monopolies are bad everywhere else; why is that not true for the Yankees? I’m certain that a good deal of the reason there’s a higher attendance in American League parks when the Yankees are there, because people are hoping – no matter how remote the chance – the Yankees will get their asses kicked.

All sports fans live in a bubble, but in most case that bubble is based on hopeless optimism – the possibility that this might be the year, even though you’re most likely going to be out of the race by May. The Yankee bubble may be the only one in all of sports that is based in arrogance and entitlement. It is based on the idea that the Yankees are the richest and most storied franchise in the world: therefore anything less than a World Championship is unacceptable. I’ve lost track of the number of Yankee managers over the years who have lost their job  after winning the AL Pennant but losing the World Series. Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra are the most legendary, but I’m fairly sure Bob Lemon and Buck Showalter are on the list. I have little doubt that if the Yankees don’t win this division series, people will be crying for Aaron Boone’s head. The New York media is driving this narrative and are here. Costas should be focusing on how the Yankees haven’t won a World Championship in an interminable thirteen years! Who cares that Cleveland last won a World Series when Harry Truman was president? Anywhere else in the country this is a ludicrous argument. To a Yankee fan, it’s the only one that matters.

And to be clear, the Yankee fans storied history is one that is was unforgiving for the legends that they celebrate. Babe Ruth was booed the first year he didn’t shatter his own home run record. DiMaggio was booed in the first years of his career for asking for money that Babe Ruth. Mantle was booed half his Yankee career for not being DiMaggio. Maris was booed during his entire Yankee career for not being Mantle and for breaking a sacred Yankee record. Lou Gehrig may never have been booed, but I’m pretty sure his biggest round of applause was when everybody knew he was going to die soon. Yankee fans, you see, have plenty of respect for the dead, but extraordinarily little for the living. Aaron Judge may have been cheered for his entire home run chase but trust me for not hitting a home run every time he bats in the postseason, the Yankee fans will no problem booing him out of town.

By the way, not that it needs to be said, but Costas was and is right. There has never been any guarantee, in the entire era of televised baseball, that a Yankee team in the postseason guarantees that most important of things – high ratings. You know what does get high ratings? A Game 7. The highest rated World Series game of all time was Game 7 of the 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox. Both teams were, in the pre-cable television era, middle-market franchises at best. Millions of people weren’t watching because they necessarily were Reds or Red Sox fans; they were watching because it had been an exciting World Series and they wanted to see who won it.

Thirty-five million people watched Game 7 of  the 2004 ALCS between the Red Sox and the Yankees. As much the Yankees fans might want to say because they were playing, we all know the real reason. The Red Sox had come back from being down three games to none and were now on the verge of making the greatest comebacks in sports history, never mind baseball. (If more people were watching because the Yankees were there, I’d argued they were watching to see the Yankees, the most uppity teams in sports, complete the biggest choke in history.

The most watched World Series in recent years was in 2016. Forty million people watched Game 7 of the 2016 World Series between the then Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs. Both teams, at that point in their history, had gone the longest gaps in their respective leagues without a World Championship. If that isn’t an argument that seeing a perennial loser triumph isn’t more interesting to even the casual sports fan than the biggest winner getting another championship, I’m not sure what I could say to convince you. The world will always prefer the underdog to the two-ton gorilla.

So Yankee fans, I won’t mind if you win a World Championship this year, but don’t expect cry long and hard if you don’t make it. My sympathy will be for the Padres and Mariners, who have never won a World Championship in their existence. For teams like the Pirates and the Reds, once storied franchises that can’t seem to get through the door any more. For the Blue Jays, who haven’t made it to the Series in thirty years or the Orioles who haven’t made it in forty. For the Mets, who try so hard to find a way to get our attention and only seem to do so when they break our hearts. For Cleveland, who really does deserve its time to win a championship now that the Red Sox and the Cubs have broken their curse. And then, maybe I’ll find a little time to feel sympathy for a team that has won twenty-six world championship, has more Hall-of-Famers than any two or three other franchises in its history, where not even victory in October  is a guarantee of job security, that has its own cable network to celebrate its achievements and who is more responsible than any other franchise in the game for making the prices of free agents so high that they are often greater than the value of any other team. I realize you considers these reasons for people to root for you; there’s actually all much better arguments as to why you’re the most hated franchise in any sport, probably worldwide.

(By the way, don’t show this article to my mom. She’s having a stressful enough week as it is.)