I don't really care much about baseball these days. Football, hockey, and English soccer are my sports. But I once did love baseball, and the Yanks were my team. They weren't very good then, though -- the period of my childhood which coincided with my baseball obsession was that dead zone after Reggie, and before Jeter. These were the Rick Cerone Yanks -- the Yanks who routinely finished 3rd or 4th in the AL East.
I really don't know why I fell out of love with baseball. It wasn't the strike, although I suppose the strike might have been the last straw. I think that it may have had something to do with the fact that Buffalo didn't have a team. As much as I loved the Yanks, and listened to every game, they couldn't compete for my affections with the Bills and Sabres. Everyone I knew cared intimately about the Sabres and Bills, especially as the Bills began to put together that great, but ultimately doomed, team of the early '90s. The Yanks began to seem farther and farther away, and as my passion toward the Yanks waned, so did my feelings about baseball itself.
Yet in spite of my lukewarm attachment to the game, I've enjoyed this long Yankee boom. You see, the Yanks are the one place in my life that I get to be a winner. I'm a Democrat, and a New Deal, big-gummint labor Democrat at that -- meaning that I'm a shrinking minority in a minority party. I'm a unionist in an era when labor is on its heels. I'm from a dying rust belt town with a permanently mediocre hockey team and -- in the Bills -- one of the most tragic teams in American sports. (Four Super Bowl losses. IN A ROW.) The soccer team that I love is in a seemingly inexorable slide toward oblivion. So when the Yanks win World Series after World Series, even though it doesn't mean nearly as much to me as even a Bills divisional playoff win, I cherish the feeling of winning. It's a silly way to get validation, but sports are like that. Anyway, as Woody Allen once said, the best part about knowing that God doesn't exist is that you know that the Knicks' games matter as much as anything else.
So I want the Yanks to win, which requires that the BoSox lose. But more importantly, I actually want the Sox to lose. I want them to lose because whether they know it or not, Sox fans cherish losing. It's what defines them. It's a culture of loserdom. The White Sox aren't the same -- they actually want to win. They don't wallow in the misery. Same with Bills fans. Even the Cubbie fans, I think, want to win. They're fatalistic -- but I don't think they're as twistedly gleeful about their fate as Beantown. If they won tonight, and then beat the Marlins, they'd have finally won -- but then there would be no difference between them and, say, the Tigers -- another grand old team with a couple of wins along the way. I want the Sox to lose for the sake of their own fans. Because if you win, you lose your entire history. Buckner no longer matters. "Bucky Dent" is no longer a dirty word. If you win, you're just like everyone else. And that's no fun. You've got the Bruins, Celtics, and Pats if you want to win. The Sox should be an inviolate preserve of failure.