Unlike the title of this post may have you believe, this has nothing to do with the internet, pot or doctors. The title is an anagram: "What would Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez Do?" I'll tell you what they wouldn't do. They would not let the Red Sox come into Yankee Stadium, in their last series in the Bronx, and take 2 of 3 in some of the most atrociously played baseball games this Yankee fan has ever witnessed. The "new Yankees" of superstars and overpaid primadonas simply does not have the passion and fire that the men to the left of your screen brought to all 162+ (they actually made the playoffs and won series in the playoffs every year) games; day in and day out. There is simply no grit, passion and fire on these Yankees. Teams who don't play with that don't win championships.
I was just discussing this with a good friend of mine, an incredibly intelligent baseball fan who appreciates all of baseball, not just Yankee baseball. I told him, "It's actually a good thing that the Yankees aren't gonna make the playoffs this year." As any Yankee fan would do he said, "How in the hell is that?" I responded by saying that this will weed out what I call the CEO Yankee fans; the fans who sit in the first level of every game in their blue Polo button down shirts and khakis on their Blackberrys the entire game who don't give a shit about winning but only saying, "Hey I went to a Yankee game last night with my sweet corporate seats". Any true baseball fan knows that real fans sit in the cheap seats because baseball is the working man's game in this country although its current form would demonstrate otherwise.
My friend and I went on to discuss that the reason why the fans of our favorite football team, the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants are such great fans are that they have endured a decade of bullshit in between championships. We, as Giants fans, have dealt with Dave Brown, Jesse Palmer, losing to Trent Dilfer and the Ravens 35-7 in the 2000 Super Bowl, all capped off with going 4-12 in 2003. Yet we still loved the Giants because they were OUR team, they're called the New York Giants but they play in the filth of the Meadowlands. They are gritty, they are tough and they play with passion. We endured a lot of terribleness before glory this year; making it all the sweeter.
Yankees fans are spoiled, plain and simple. We got to witness our team making the playoffs every year from 1995-2007 and 4 World Series, including 3 in a row. No other fans have experienced such a run, but all such runs must come to an end. The fans, like the team, have become richer. As tickets become more and more unaffordable for the average family, the teams payroll skyrocketed with players who have done what amounts to a pile of shit, either in the regular or post seasons in their careers as Yankees (ARod, Giambi, Damon, Abreu, Pavano, etc.). Perhaps next year us real Yankee fans (those who remember the whe Don Mattingly was the only shining light on the team) will see the true colors of those Polo blue CEO fans.
Yankees fans are the AJ Sopranos of Major League Baseball. They were given everything and pissed it away by being arrogant whiny little bitches. I love the Yankees and always will, but that organization and its fans need to wake up and appreciate all we've been given over the past decade. As I closed the conversation with my friend, "fuck giambi, fuck arod, fuck pudge, fuck damon, molina is cool, fuck abreu, i'm out."
