THE FUN BUNCH
Yankees have brought joy back to The Bronx
THE Yankees may not win the World Series this year. They may not finish in first place. Heck, there are five months left in the baseball season. A lot can go wrong, or at least a little sideways, in five months.
But there is one thing these Yankees already have clinched.
They are a fun team. Fun to follow. Fun to watch. Fun to write about. Fun to talk about. Now, there are no playoff shares given out to “fun” teams. There are no trophies handed out, no parades scheduled. And fun is subjective. After all, for as much fun as their rally from down 9-1, down 11-4 and down 11-8 might have been for Yankees fans Friday night … well, there remain a lot of people who hate the Yankees.
So that night was the opposite of fun, whatever word that is.
Of course, fun is in the eye of the beholder anyway. The Yankees have been fun before, and sometimes that fun actually does result in something tangible: 1996, for instance, when the Yankees didn’t have the highest payroll, when they had a bunch of kids coming together for the first time and a manager, Joe Torre, learning how to win on the fly, too.
But there are a lot of Yankees fans of a certain age who will insist to you — even with the seven titles they’ve won since 1977, even with the titles in the ’50s and ’60s some of them might have been old enough to remember — the two most fun seasons of all were two years when they finished second to the Orioles: 1970 and 1974.
In ’70, the Yankees won 93 games — 10 more than the defending-champion Mets — and though they made some traditional Yankees fans squeamish when they popped champagne on the day they clinched second place … hey, in those days the check for finishing second was meaningful money. Plus, this was the heyday of the Orioles, who won 108 games that year.
Also, it was one of just two times in the Dog Days connecting 1965 and 1975 that the Yankees won more than 83 games — the other was in ’74, when they were in first place as late as the 154th game of the season and still were within a halfgame after game 160. That was the season Yankees fans began to sniff success again, after a long dry spell, and it remains a favorite season for many fans over age 55 or so.
A fun season, in all ways but the ending.
Mets fans understand. In a lot of ways 1984 and ’85 were more fun than 1986 — in ’86, the pressure to win was there from the start, and when they actually did win it was more a sense of relief than anything else (a lot of championship Yankees seasons have been that way). The ride up is when much of the fun happens.
Aging Knicks fans who still worship 1970 and ’73? They’ll tell you that it was the 1968-69 team that really latched them on the hook for life, because that was the season they acquired Dave DeBusschere and really began to click, even if the Celtics took them out in the playoffs in one last hurrah for Bill Russell. Later, it was the 1991-92 team (with Xavier McDaniel sneering the whole way) that captured a fresh generation of fans, even more so than the nearmiss teams that would follow the rest of the decade.
Sure, it is good to have bothboth — the fun and the ring — and that can happen, too (see: 1968 Jets, and both of the Giants’ Super Bowl wins over the Patriots). And when rings don’t follow fun — the ’99-’00 Mets were fun in that way, and so were the 1998 Jets — the fun isn’t recalled quite so fondly.
Still, we spend so much time allowing angst to infiltrate our sporting passions … a little fun doesn’t hurt anyone does it?