The Written Word
for October 31, 2001

I am a lifetime Yankee hater. It started when I was a small boy of 9 when the damyankees beat my Dodgers after Mickey Owen dropped a third strike taking a win away from the Dodgers.

I delighted when, in 1947, Brooklyn’s Cookie Lavagetto broke up Bill Beven;s no-hitter and won the game (did you know that Hugh Casey got the win after throwing only one pitch? You could look it up, as Casey would say) but I suffered the torments of the damned when the Dodgers lost the series. As they did in 1949, 1952 and 1953 with the wonderful bunch known as the Boys of Summer. It was a great team … there was Jackie and Pee Wee … and Gil and the Duke … there was Carl the pitcher and Carl the great outfielder … and Campy and the Newk … the latter, Don Newcome could never pitch decently in the World Series and it drove him to drink.

Then came 1955 and Johnny Podres shut them Yanks down 2-0 in the seventh game and the Dodgers, down two games to none, had finally won a World Series. (I’ll refrain from mentioning 1956 when the Yanks down 2-0 came back to win in seven except it prompted one Dodger fan to say "Wait ‘til last year"!

The big year was ’63 when the Dodgers thumped ‘em four straight. My great pal, and Yankee fan extraordinaire, the late Bob Hodder had tickets to see his beloved Yanks play Game 5 in Los Angeles but the game was never played.

In recent years my interest has waned. I can’t keep track of who’s playing where and, let’s face it, it’s been pretty slim pickings for us Dodger fans since 1988.

So here we are once again at the October Classic, now mostly played in November and the Yankees are at it again. As much as I am a fan of anything these days, I’m partial to the National League if only because the pitcher has to hit. But, dammit, I find myself sort of cheering for New York.

It’s not the baseball team I’m cheering for but the nearly 7000 people who died there on September 11. There must be a lot of mourners who would feel just a little bit better if the Yankees would win the big one for their town. And a lot of those mourners are kids.

That seems to me reason enough to break the habit of a lifetime and cheer for the, ugh, New York Yankees.