View from the bleachers
April 2003
by Mike Webb

After reading my blog from last night, I realized that sentence about 'baseball not being my favorite sport so my only allegiance was to…well…er…baseball', kind of lost whatever sense it might have made when my brain thought it out.

But I think I was trying to get at the fact that as I've grown up (so to speak) and learned how to play the game, the game means more to me than the prism I view the sport through (the Yankees). So because my team is constantly winning, it's easy to be a fan of the sport. The true test will come when the Yanks finally face some adversity or when Steinbrenner fires Joe Torre and pisses me off for the final time. When one of those things happens, I think I'm prepared to drop the Yanks, and find a new team to follow to get my baseball jones fulfilled. So I don't know if that makes me a "fair weather" Yankees fan or not, because I'm not sure what a true Yankees fan is – and I never claimed to be one anyway.

Frankly, I stopped following baseball when I moved from Chicago when I was about 10-years-old. In fact, I hated the sport for the next two decades because it always seemed to get in the way. But one day in June of '96, a junior A&R guy from Geffen Records invited a bunch of us to come with him to a Yankees game. For whatever reason, I was the only one to show up. It was my first game ever at Yankee Stadium (not Dow Jones Ballpark or Verizon Field, but simply Yankee Stadium), and I was so stupid and in awe that I couldn't find the "big bat" where I was supposed to meet him. (If you drive by "the Stadium", it's practically impossible to miss "the big bat".) Anyway, we decided to get seats in the bleachers. For the next 3-4 years, I would only sit in the bleachers because it was the bestest place on Earth to view a sporting event.

Yankee "bleacher creatures" were a rare breed. I say were, because now they have assigned seating which prevents the same crew from congregating together and they no longer serve alcohol. So the whole vibe has changed. But back in '96 when I found them, they would give hell to the outfielder who dropped a fly ball by telling him to get his bags ready to go down to the AA squad. Or they'd take the easy route and question his manhood or diss his mother everytime he came out. If you walked into the bleacher section with purple hair, the bleacher creatures would shout "East Village!" at you for a minute or two. If you paid $15 to sit in the far, right field, upper deck seats, you got harassed with chants of "box seats suck!" Catch a home run ball from the other team? You were much better off throwing it back instead of keeping your souvenir. If the guy selling Yankee gear walked by, the crowd would do the carnival barking for him, but instead of "programs for sale" you heard "shit for sale." If Paul O'Neill hit a homer, he'd be greeted by a standing ovation when he walked out to his right field spot. And in the first inning of every game, the bleacher creatures would shout the names of each Yankee starter until they acknowledged them with a quick wave (and yeah, we know you heard us Scott Brosius as you made us chant your name for 5 minutes before waving back you bastard!).

So how could you not follow the Yankees? Suddenly you catch yourself watching the games to see if you could catch any of the bleacher creature shenanigans. Then you get caught up with what Bobby Murcer and Ken Singleton have to say. The Yanks make the playoffs. Then they make it to the '96 World Series to face the Braves. A perfect match up – Joe Torre vs his old team, and the North vs the South again. Your team is down 2 games to none, so you don't even watch game 3. Then, being the part-time fan you admittedly are, you start to watch games 4, 5 and 6 and laugh out loud as Wade Boggs rides around the stadium on a cop horse saluting the fans.

So I have no qualms about being a Yankee fan – I came to my Pinstripes naturally (and the 4 world championships didn’t impede that either). But I know there are baseball fascists out there, and if I hadn't come to the Yankees that way, I'd probably hate them too. So I'm pretty sure I'll drop them when the appropriate time comes. Only being 12-3 in the middle of April is not the time to start following the 6-10 Mets.

(Mike Webb is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)