Emerging from the wreck
Oct. 26th, 2003 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularSadly, the Teddy Berra icon must be retired until the year 2004. It occurs to me that ever since the new Administration came to power, it has been a very very bad stretch for New York City.
Baseball sometimes serves as a microcosm for that, I suppose. The Yankees are hated, and it's okay to hate them, to declare them the enemy, to rejoice at their fall...
I think I shan't turn on the radio until sometime after Election Day, and am locking ESPN.com out of my browser's dialing sequence. But for now...
I wanted to make an icon. Something saying the following:
My city.
My team.
Proud of it, come what may.
*sigh* But it would take animating, and I've no clue how to do that. Heck, I don't understand enough about the copy of Photoshop I inherited to do much of anything.
Being a Yankee fan is like being an American abroad in hostile territory, it seems to me sometimes. Everyone considers you the enemy, and nothing you can do is right. If the Yankees win, well, that's a sign of the unfairness of life, right? And if they lose? Heap on the ridicule, laugh until next April, and revel in the misery that comes with someone else losing.
(Yeah, I know that some Yankee fans do that when the Red Sox go down in flames. Doesn't make it right.)
But you know what? Frell that.
First time I saw the Yankees in the World Series, they got wiped out by the Dodgers in six games. 1981 - like the dawn of time, so far as my baseball knowledge goes. After that, they were a sub-par team for a long time. Then the Nineties rolled around...
1994 might have been The Year. Until the strike hit. :(
1995, and they got knocked out in the first round by the Mariners.
Then came 1996.
One team ready to establish a dynasty, to make its mark as "America's Team", powered by one of the largest media magnates in known history, thinking of the World Series almost as a formality. The other team ... led by a first-year manager whose previous record had little to speak for it, having lost their best player to retirement, a couple of might-have-been-great players who'd blown their careers and were trying for redemption...
...and everybody said that the Atlanta Braves were going to win their second straight title, that the New York Yankees had no chance.
That was the year you couldn't hate the Yankees. By '98, they were once again the Evil Empire, the team everybody wanted to knock off ... even in defeat, they sometimes seem to be The Team To Beat.
For a Yankee fan, "wait 'til next year" isn't a consoling thought; it is, perhaps, a rallying cry, a statement that even if the quest fell short this year, the year before, and the year before that, you may hate us, you may wish us ill, but you'd better not forget that we're there, that we want to win as much as you do, that whatever you do, you'd better acknowledge that we are For Real.
My city.
My team.
And proud of it, come what may.
Baseball sometimes serves as a microcosm for that, I suppose. The Yankees are hated, and it's okay to hate them, to declare them the enemy, to rejoice at their fall...
I think I shan't turn on the radio until sometime after Election Day, and am locking ESPN.com out of my browser's dialing sequence. But for now...
I wanted to make an icon. Something saying the following:
My city.
My team.
Proud of it, come what may.
*sigh* But it would take animating, and I've no clue how to do that. Heck, I don't understand enough about the copy of Photoshop I inherited to do much of anything.
Being a Yankee fan is like being an American abroad in hostile territory, it seems to me sometimes. Everyone considers you the enemy, and nothing you can do is right. If the Yankees win, well, that's a sign of the unfairness of life, right? And if they lose? Heap on the ridicule, laugh until next April, and revel in the misery that comes with someone else losing.
(Yeah, I know that some Yankee fans do that when the Red Sox go down in flames. Doesn't make it right.)
But you know what? Frell that.
First time I saw the Yankees in the World Series, they got wiped out by the Dodgers in six games. 1981 - like the dawn of time, so far as my baseball knowledge goes. After that, they were a sub-par team for a long time. Then the Nineties rolled around...
1994 might have been The Year. Until the strike hit. :(
1995, and they got knocked out in the first round by the Mariners.
Then came 1996.
One team ready to establish a dynasty, to make its mark as "America's Team", powered by one of the largest media magnates in known history, thinking of the World Series almost as a formality. The other team ... led by a first-year manager whose previous record had little to speak for it, having lost their best player to retirement, a couple of might-have-been-great players who'd blown their careers and were trying for redemption...
...and everybody said that the Atlanta Braves were going to win their second straight title, that the New York Yankees had no chance.
That was the year you couldn't hate the Yankees. By '98, they were once again the Evil Empire, the team everybody wanted to knock off ... even in defeat, they sometimes seem to be The Team To Beat.
For a Yankee fan, "wait 'til next year" isn't a consoling thought; it is, perhaps, a rallying cry, a statement that even if the quest fell short this year, the year before, and the year before that, you may hate us, you may wish us ill, but you'd better not forget that we're there, that we want to win as much as you do, that whatever you do, you'd better acknowledge that we are For Real.
My city.
My team.
And proud of it, come what may.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-25 10:48 pm (UTC)I couldn't get all the text in.