Yankees Hater

The Yankees have played pretty good baseball in 2009. But their fans will have few smiles this season if the Bombers continue to get owned by their chief rival, the Red Sox.

The Sox came from behind last night to post their eighth win this season against the Yankees without a loss.

Yanks fans are already turning on A.J. Burnett, likening him to Jeff Weaver and Carl Pavano. Wang might soon be a minor leaguer. Joe Girardi has them missing Joe Torre horribly. This team is just 2 games out of first place, but it feels like a mess in the Bronx.

Which is kind of nice.

Editor’s note: This masterpiece came from a blogger on the Yankees fan site, Yankeeroundtable.com. A pleasure for Sox fans to read…

I am so sick of this team. I want everyone fired. I want the baby, the bathwater, the sink, the toilet, the whole bathroom out the window. I’ve been watching this since 2004. It doesn’t matter who you bring in, it’s the same thing. Humiliation. Pain. Nothing but pain watching this pathetic organization.

Ok. Let’s talk. The Red Sox are better in every aspect of baseball. EVERY. Shall we dissect it?

The GM. Yeah, that’s right. Their GM is better. He consistently does more with less money. Any moron can throw $130 million at the top free agent pitcher and sign him. Who cares? Manny Ramirez, a HOF right handed hitter is gone? No problem, let’s swing a deal for Jason Bay. We’ll bat him sixth, it really doesn’t matter and he’ll torture the Yankees. GM better, check.

The Manager. Oh yeah, that’s right. They have a better manager in the dugout. Yeah, Yankee fans used to be so arrogant about Terry Francona. You know what. He was better than Torre in the last 3 years of Torre’s tenure. and he’s much better than Girardi. That team loves playing for Francona. Oh yeah, Manager better, check.

The Players. Oh yeah, that’s right the players are better. Duh? Ellsbury is better than Gardener. The bloom is off that rose. Drew is better than Swisher. Bay is better than Damon. Pedroia is better than Cano. And Youkilis is better than TEX. Lester is better than Joba. Beckett is better than Sabathia. Dice K is better than Wang. Better, better, better. Posada is better than Varitek, of course, Varitek can still hit a grand slam whenever he wants. Oh and by the way, I’m sick of Matsui, get him out of here. Send him to Texas where he can DH or something. The bullpen is better, (see GM above).

They have a better stadium now. Better, better, better. Our stadium is like a total superficial wannabe park. Kind of like Disney World. The people who drive the cabs, put out the fires, staff the hospitals and work in the schools want to root for the Sox and go to Fenway. What do we have? We’re like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Chairo, Liberace, and all the other no-talent, empty-headed, pretty boys who want to make another run on the Love Boat. They want to come toedfa Yankee Stadium. The real gritty and passionate fans don’t want to come to Yankee Stadium and can’t identify with this team enough to really root for it and care about it. And you know what? That’s what really stinks about this. If I’m going to get embarassed, I at least want to be the underdog. But I can’t claim the underdog status when I got a $200 million payroll and the Magic Kingdom for a baseball stadium. Yeah, the Sox may have really lost their underdog status a few years ago, but it doesn’t really matter. All the real baseball fans root for them anyway.

I can’t stand what this organization has become.

Three games, three wins. A blown Mariano Rivera save. A Varitek grandslam. A Jacoby Ellsbury steal of home. A 6-0 lead coughed up by the high-priced staff ace. Jeter striking out in the clutch.

Could any Sox fan possibly ask for any more fun in a single weekend?

Thanks Yankees. Please come again.

Feels like old times.

Back in 2004, Sox third baseman Bill Mueller capped off the infamous Varitek/A-Rod brawlgame by sending a Mariano Rivera pitch into the bullpen for the game winning HR.

Friday night’s game game had a touch of that old Sox/Yanks edginess, as David Ortiz had criticized the inside pitching (head hunting?) of Joba Chamberlain against Kevin Youkilis in prior matchups.

The Youkilis/Chamberlain storyline did not play out in Friday’s game, but Youk was nearly involved in some headhunting of his own in the bottom of the ninth inning. He sent a Rivera pitch screaming back up the middle, narrowly missing the reliever’s melon. Teammate Jason Bay later deposited a Rivera pitch in the Green Monster, and the Yanks–needing just one more out–had blown a 4-2 lead.

In Youkilis’ next at-bat in the bottom of the 11th inning, he made like Mueller and hit a towering HR over the Green Monster to give the Sox a satisfying 5-4 win.

This win counts the same as a win against, say, the Royals or the Orioles. But it FEELS so much better, doesn’t it.

For those who watched the broadcast of this game–and were still watching in the bottom of the ninth–you might have seen a Yankee fan trying to be excessively annoying while sitting just a few rows behind home play. With a Yankee win seemingly imminent, this fan (wearing a light blue t-shirt) made a point to overly punctuate every Rivera strike by pumping his fists and raising his arms (really…after every strike?). He seemed to relish the experience of rubbing it in while surrounded by Boston faithful.

When Bay launched the game-tying HR, he jumped to his feet and again threw his arms up in triumph, apparently believing that Bay had hit a harmless fly ball that would be caught for the third out. Nice call, buddy.

On behalf of all of the Haters, thank you for providing us with such a nice visual: you, with a very long ride back home to your likely perch in the NYC metropolitan area. Please come again.

There are not many people who can quickly move a million dollars of product, just by wearing something in public.

Curt Schilling can. Or, at least, he could have. But we failed him.

Back in the spring of 2004, Schilling was Boston’s big man about town. Still smarting from the painful loss to the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS, the Red Sox fan base (and media) welcomed their new free agent ace and hung on his every word. There was revenge to be extracted, and the tough, intimidating Schilling would dispense it in a rough-and-tumble way. That was the theory, anyway.

That’s the way it evolved, too. Schilling quickly took to the airwaves, starring in a storied Dunkin Donuts commercial in which he comically worked on his Boston accent. He wanted to fit in, and the Boston fans wanted to fit him in.

All of that came together in the biggest sort of way, when Curt Schilling wore one of our prototype YH caps to a Boston Bruins game on April 20, 2004. The image was captured by a Boston Herald photographer, and the picture later made ESPN SportsCenter and too many newspapers and magazines to count. Curt the Yankee Hater had arrived. And Boston was loving it.

On April 21, 2004, we opened our NJ-based website for business for the first time. Hundreds of miles away, the Herald newspaper with the Schilling picture was just hitting the newsstands. For several hours that morning, we were oblivious to the whirlwind that was about to descend upon our lives.

We never planned for anything big to happen with our YH caps. We loved the YH cap samples we had seen and developed over the cold winter months. But it was like the type of love you have for your own baby. No one else ever cares as much as you do. YankeesHater.com was borne out of a practical joke, and that was enough satisfaction for us. We figured we would open the website, play around for a while, and then close it down after selling a handful of caps.

Schilling’s donning of the YH cap, however, created a different fate for us. Honestly, if we had $1 million of inventory available on April 21, 2004, we could have sold it all within a couple days. And without the help of a national channel of distribution. As it turned out, our starting inventory was gone in a few hours. Caps went to Japan, the Netherlands, Aruba, Canada, the UK, Iraq and every state in the U.S.! Sure, we had touched a serious nerve with the YH cap. But without Schill, none of this would have been possible. We only wish that we had the infrastructure in place to properly gauge his popularity. We didn’t, but it sure was fun to try to keep up with the orders anyway. It took us months to catch up.

With the economy seized up, it takes a perfect product to get a consumer to spend money these days. For one day in time–April 21, 2004–we had the perfect product, fueled by the inadvertent actions of the perfect (albeit unwitting) and unofficial endorser.

Thanks for the memories, Curt, and may your retirement be robust and happy!

No player, with the possible exception of Bucky Dent, caused as much pain for Red Sox fans as did Aaron Boone. Then a member of the Yankees, Boone hit a game-winning HR off Boston’s Tim Wakefield in the seventh game of the 2003 ALCS. Aaron $%#@!&* Boone is literally the reason that this website exists.

Right now, none of that matters.

It was announced today that Boone will soon undergo open heart surgery. We wish this little %&*$#!’er a successful &^%$#@*! surgery and a speedy %&*^$#@! recovery. Here’s to your health, Aaron!

I fondly remember the old days of the World Wrestling Federation. You knew everything was fake–including the physiques–but no one cared. The characters were charismatic, the story lines were laughable yet engaging, and the wrestlers were admired for their unrelenting drive to entertain.

In short, the wrestlers would stop at nothing. And the crowd ate it up.

It’s that way in the MLB these days. The fans willingly pay a ton of money for tickets and get a hometown roster riddled with steroid users. The thing is, I am not sure the fans really care that much. They don’t have to nurse the player through middle age as a “broken down piece of meat”. Sadly, once they have laid out $300 for a pair of OK tickets at Yankee Stadium, all they really want is a few hours of entertainment. Maybe with a few 500-foot homers along the way…

If polled, I am sure that a significant percentage of fans would be in favor of dropping all forms of drug testing and turning MLB into a chemistry free-for-all. Best mixture of talent and drugs win.

In horseracing, many states allow the use of an anti-bleeding drug named Lasix. Nearly all bettors know that Lasix also has performance-enhancing qualities. However, the use of Lasix is permitted as long as its use is disclosed by the horse’s trainer. Bettors can see the Lasix designation and decide, before wagering their hard-earned money, whether the horse has a suitable mix of talent and drug therapy to outperform his competitors in the upcoming race.

Perhaps that is the right approach for MLB.

“Now playing third base for the New York Yankees, Number 13, Alex Rodriguez. Tonight, Alex will be playing with the CREAM and a small dose of ginkoba,” the announcer might say.

The fans’ outrage about steroid use in MLB is borne primarily out of a feeling of being duped. If MLB is all about being a cash cow, then just make the players report what they are taking so that your customers don’t have to feel stupid. Who knows, as fans as we just might enjoy following the sidebar story.

“Our starting pitcher tonight is 13-2 with a 1.45 ERA on just two cycles of steroids this season,” one fan might say to another. “He’s off the stuff now, because he and his wife want to have kids. But I am betting he’ll only lose 7-8 miles on the radar gun. I figure that might still be enough to win.”

I can see fans having all kinds of fun with discussions like that. Have you seem how vocal people can get when debating whether or not Airborne actually works?

You can’t stop performance-enhancing from permeating the game. So tell the players they can use whatever they want, so long as they disclose the substance. The fans already think the game is rigged in favor of the juicers anyway, so the least MLB can do is give the fans a little more entertainment value for the buck.

A new stadium. A massive contract for CC Sabathia. The Bronx seems to have its own economy, one in which money grows on trees and extreme spending is a neighborhood pickup sport.

But just wait until April.

With Yankees’ tickets becoming as expensive as football tickets, fans will not tolerate very much in the way of losing. Sure, many will want to see the new stadium. So, 2009 will be a novelty season with lofty attendance. But if the Yankees continue to fail miserably on the field like in 2008, then 2010 may stand as the team’s Great Depression.

In a tough economy, $8 hot dogs and $10 beers don’t fly if the team is lousy. The Yankees are obligated to charge big dollars for concessions, because the stadium is expensive and so are the players. The Yankees failure to make a connection between the economy and the Sabathia contract is a major mistake that may have long-term negative ripples.

The only way out? Win a championship. Of course, the Yankees haven’t done that in a while. Jeter is getting older. The new breed of Steinbrenner hardly looks like the old. Looks like storm clouds are moving in…

Yankees were cast from the playoff race on Tuesday, which was good news for travel site, Expedia.

“Yeah, a few of them have logged in in order to book October trips,” said a website rep. “They want to go to far away places and be anonymous. Unfortunately, MLB shipped thousands of ill-fated “2004 World Series Champion New York Yankees” t-shirts to some of those far-away, poor nations in need of clothing. So there’s a danger of being pulled back into reality real quick.”

For its part, the Yankees organization urged its fans to keep things in perspective.

“We are aware that all Yankee fans have a lifetime right to see the team win a championship each year, so missing the playoffs is a bit of a head-scratcher” a team rep said. “But God works in mysterious ways. Who knows? There’s a still a week to go in the regular reason. Wouldn’t that give MLB ample time to grant us a regular-season exemption and send us straight into the playoffs, given our many past successes?”

Members of the Bronx, N.Y. community felt that Yankee Stadium deserved a better final chapter than what the 2008 players wrote.

“Back in the day, all you could hear on summer nights was wild cheering,” said Jose, a long-time borough resident. “This year, the sounds were gone and the stink moved in. You know that smell you encounter when you’re driving behind a municipal waste truck? It was like driving behind a hundred of those in a convertible with no AC on a 100-degree day. In stop and go traffic.”

Jeff Cantina, a local economist, had his own theory on why the 2008 Yankees failed miserably.

“It’s clear that ‘pay for play’ works…that theory has been proven several times in NY over the past 15 years,” said Cantina. “So if the ‘play’ comes up short, you have to assume that these players were not sufficiently compensated. This is basic logic at work here.”

The Big Apple’s paparazzi were milling around the stadium tonight, trying to get the inside track on where media grabbers Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez would be vacationing. A few of the shutter-men had some educated guesses.

“Jeter…he’s obsessed with winning, so he’ll probably book a hotel on Lansdowne Street in Boston and look to experience victory vicariously,” said one of the camera-toting ‘razzi. “A-Rod likes reflections. I hear he’s been looking for a large, still lake that he can peer directly into. I think the Travel Channel has been sending him wind patterns for the Boundary Waters region of Minnesota.”

A fan of the rival Red Sox, had just this to say:

“I love what Hank has done with the team.”

Hank, in turn, had this to say:

“That Red Sox fan said what? I’ll beat his ass good. Where is he? The Yankees will not become a mockery.”

After being informed that the Sox fan in question was a 10-year-old girl, Hank stepped up his rampage until being escorted out of Yankee Stadium by his own security team. Apparently, he kicked one of the chairs in the stadium, which did not square with security’s current directive to protect the innards of the park from vandalism and looting at all costs.

Similar enforcement measures were not taken against the Yankees players, who have effectively defaced the stadium all year with poor hitting, lousy pitching, and error-prone fielding.

(This article was written by Sean McKnight, a reporter who is entirely fictitious. The content of this article in entirely false, except the glorious part about the Yankees missing the playoffs. This is a parody. That’s like an April Fool’s joke, except in September. If you still don’t get it, take off your Yankees cap and go sleep on it).

The Yankees confiscated suntan lotion at Yankee Stadium over the weekend, forcing fans to bake in 96-degree heat with no protection against dangerous UV rays. The reason for this decision: concern for the fans safety.

The Yanks either missed or ignored this statistic: there are 1 million new cases of skin cancer reported each year. And young children are particularly sensitive to harmful rays.

The Bombers’ offices initially claimed that confiscating suntan lotion was an anti-terrorism measure. Then, the New York Post reported the ludicrous, dangerous ban and the Yanks quickly altered their position. Now, 3-ounce containers of suntan lotion are permitted inside Yankee Stadium.

The speed at which the Yanks changed the policy is telling. You have to question the sincerity of the Yanks’ anti-terrorism rationale given the reversal. I know someone who runs security for a major U.S. corporation. If he firmly believed that allowing suntan lotion was unsafe in the terrorism sense, there is no amount of public opinion that would have gotten that protocol changed.

So if not terrorism, what was the motivation of the Yankees in putting the ban in place? The Yankees did sell 1-ounce tubes of lotion at the stadium for $5, according to the New York Post story. That same tube can be purchased from the supplier (Arizona Sun) online for a retail price of $2.30. Is a fan’s safety really worth $2.70 of profit margin?

Frankly, this weekend, Yankee Stadium was far from an All-Star park.