The 250 Square Foot View

Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify because the players are always changing, the team could move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You are standing and yelling and cheering for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt. They hate him now! BOO. Different shirt! BOO. -Jerry Seinfeld

Every so often I sit back and audit my sports fandom. Living in Manhattan a few years back at the height of Linsanity, I found it easy to root for the hometown Knicks. But after several abysmal seasons, I dropped them. Same for the Giants, who had a great run including two Super Bowls, but have proven just how difficult it is to stay competitive for an extended period of time. Last season, I barely watched a quarter of their games (i.e. 15 minutes, not 4 games).

The only team for which I have true sports loyalty is the Yankees. But even they don’t get my unconditional love. Back in 2012 I contemplated whether I’d still follow the Yankees as closely when my all-time favorite player, Derek Jeter, retired.

In typical Seinfeldian “it’s funny because it’s true” fashion, I’m still rooting for the pinstriped clothes even if there are different people wearing them now versus when my fandom began in the 1990s.

Though I moved from New York to Virginia in 2015, I keep up with NY local sports talk radio online via ESPN’s The Michael Kay Show. (Kay is also the Yankees’ primary TV announcer.) Every day, older callers–many of whom start their calls with, “I’ve been a Yankee fan since” and then specifying a year in the 1930s, ’40s or ’50s–lament the game they fell in love with as children, only to barely recognize it in its modern form. Striking out, for example, was traditionally thought of as the worst possible result of an at-bat; now, teams literally don’t care at all if every out a batter makes is by strikeout, as long as their other success metrics align with The Analytics.

I capitalize The Analytics because it’s become a catch-all for justyfing why a seemingly bizarre decision is made by a manager over the course of a game. There are no longer any “gut decisions”; teams have led us to believe that there are no decisions at all, because that would imply bias, of which the numbers used in The Analytics have none.

(Admittedly, as an occasional Blackjack player, The Analytics are precisely how I try to beat the house. Going with your gut in a game designed to bleed you unless you play the razor thin odds is just silly. But, it’s not quite as fun.)

These days even I find myself being all get off my lawn when I hear that the Yankees signed another relief pitcher who throws 100 miles per hour. (These personnel decisions are, of course, driven by The Analytics.) Watching a player strike out (one on my team or the opposition) is very boring to me. I miss guys like Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs, who were impossible to defend because they would just “hit ’em where they ain’t.” I miss guys like Greg Maddux, who barely threw 90 mph but could make any batter feel off balance and uncomfortable, or Mariano Rivera, who got to the Hall of Fame with one pitch, his devasting cutter.

A few months ago I saw a video called “The Rotary Phone Challenge,” in which two teenagers were tasked with successfully dialing a number from a rotary phone in under four minutes. Is this how my son will view so many things I grew up with, including baseball? If nothing else, I guess I’ll have an amusing viral video to show for it.