hughbiquitous

"Winning at all costs is boring."

I read that in an ESPN piece the other day, and I thought it was a spot-on description of my feelings as a New York Yankee fan. As it happens, the article was about the Steinbrenner effect:

The past few years… Yankees fans [have] had the fun smacked out of [them]. Such is the byproduct of watching your team purchase so many high-priced free agents, then watching them beat up on the Kansas City Royals and Tampa Bay Devil Rays en route to the inevitable — and joyless — postseason berth.

Exactly. Joyless. If the Yankees win, they’ve merely done their duty. If they lose, it’s a double disappointment: not only do they watch somebody else go home with the hardware, they face the crushing weight of impossible expectations. You just can’t win.

As a result, Joe Torre will soon be out of a job, unless the madness of King George takes an improbable detour. Mr. Torre has delivered twelve straight seasons of postseason ball: ten division titles, two wild-card berths, six American League pennants, and four World Series rings. For crying out loud, in one of the final Peanuts comics, Charlie Brown said, "This is my Joe Torre look. I’m going to use it next season. I’ll manage the team from the bench like Joe Torre, and I’ll stare at everybody like this. And we’ll win every game." Because since Joe Torre took the helm in 1996, they’ve just about won every game. And he’s about to get fired because the Yankees lost in the first round of playoffs for three years in a row. Translation: Win it all, Yankees, for that is your duty.

But please, Mr. Steinbrenner, if you’re going to fire Joe Torre, please explain to me why I should believe his successor will do his duty of "winning it all" better than Mr. Torre. And as long as I’m addressing you, Mr. Steinbrenner, you ought to know that I don’t care as much about winning as I do about enjoying my favorite team. The best way to do that involves winning. But I can face November without the World Series win and still enjoy the team.

I often ask "what does that look like" to turn abstract ideas into something useful. So what does an Enjoyable Team look like? Let me put it this way: winning is the plot of the story, but what makes a story great are characters you actually care about.

The Enjoyable Team has young guys who come up through the organization and make it big, like Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, and Jorge Posada. It’s got a few guys that other teams give up on, but you take a chance on them anyway — like Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius (pictured here). Then tack on the veteran superstar who’s never won the championship, Roger Clemens: he just wants to play for a team that can help him bring home the hardware, and he brings his Hall-of-Fame A-game to make it happen. (Of all those guys, only Clemens, and probably Jeter and Rivera, will make it onto a Hall of Fame ballot with any shot of making it in. So we’re not talking about a boatload of superstars here.)

I’ve been a Yankee fan ever since I was a six-year-old kid watching Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in three swings to win it all in 1977. But even then, being a Yankee fan was no fun. Then King George got suspended from baseball in the early ’90s, and the Yankees started being fun for the first time ever. Even with Steinbrenner’s return, they gave me Enjoyable Teams from 1994 to 2001. But in 2002 they lost to the Angels, a team that was clearly having fun while the Yankees were not. What was the difference?

The difference is that you can take an Enjoyable Team and turn it into a joyless team by adding duty-bound, high-priced, overachieving, over-the-top (and often over-the-hill) free agents like Jason Giambi, Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Gary Sheffield, Johnny Damon, and Alex Rodriguez. (Though when they traded for A-Rod, I loved Peter Gammons’ take on it: "The Beatles Just Got Elvis.")

Still, I enjoy the Yankees at another level, a level that makes others hate them with passion equal to my delight. This is a team that has over two dozen championships on its resume and a history that includes names like Dimaggio, Ruth, Mantle, and Gehrig. It has Yankee Stadium and its 97-year-old public address announcer, Bob Sheppard, the “Voice of God,” whose pronunciation is so clear it has been said you could hear each “g” when he introduced Wade Boggs.

Speaking of Mr. Gehrig, this was a sort of perfect requiem for the Joe Torre Yankees: after watching the Yankees lose to Cleveland the other day, I just had to watch something else for a while before hitting the sack. A couple channels away, I found this:

As #4 walked off the field at the end of the movie, I couldn’t help but believe I’ve seen the last of Mr. Torre’s #6. If that’s the case, it’s a sad thing. With him will go some great memories. Even the bad memories had enough good to make them sweet. The 2001 World Series loss to Arizona featured two of the most exciting games I’ve ever watched, the "Mystique and Aura" games in which the Yankees were down to their last out — on consecutive days — but hit home runs to tie and then win. Aaron Boone’s home run to beat the Red Sox in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS almost entirely obscures the loss to the Marlins in the World Series that year.

And I guess that underscores the point I made earlier: I just want to enjoy my favorite team, and I can do that without World Series championships — even though I really, really want them. But when going home as the winner is the only thing you care about, going home joyful gets picked off every time.