FEEL THE LOVE

Yanks suddenly likeable — or at least hard to hate

HOUSTON — Right off the airplane, there is a man who seems terribly confused. His name is Darren Frank, and he lives in Bellaire, Texas, about 15 minutes west of downtown. He is wearing a Yankees cap. He is also wearing a No. 60 Dallas Keuchel jersey. He admits to being torn. “My whole life, I hated everything about the Yankees,” says Frank, who runs a landscaping company. “I mean it was all I had when the Astros were awful. I figured as long as the Yankees were losing — or weren’t winning as much as they used to — then all was OK with the world.” He shrugs. “What can I tell you, I really like this team,” he says. “They came in here this year and played the Astros and I came looking for blood and … I found that they’re easy to like. The Yankees. “I mean, I’m rooting for the Astros. For the first time I actually wish we were still in the National League so we could play in the World Series. Maybe if they beat us, I’ll feel the same way I used to.” This is not a unique case, and you know it, you can feel it. The Yankees are in one of their periodic reboots, and what’s occurred, as much as anything, is the unveiling of a feel-good team that is … well, it’s hard to hate. Let’s start with Yankees fans themselves, who never fully fall out of love with their team but … OK, let’s be honest: The Yankees had become a collection of dullards the past few years. They still won (though not as often). They still drew a lot of people to the ballpark (though not as many) and to TV screens (though not as frequently). What was the word Jimmy Carter used once? That’s what the Yankees were in the past few years. A malaise. “I still watched,” says Ray Ferrante, a Yankees fan since 1951 who used to live on Staten Island and now enjoys the sunshine of Boca Raton. “But it was … I don’t know. I’ve always hated these whiny Yankees fans who complain about every loss, so it wasn’t that. It was just … boring. My Yankees were boring.”

And, of course, being a Yankees fan allows you to store the kind of reservoirs of hope that elude some teams.

“Going back to George Steinbrenner, win or lose, they always put money back into the team to win, it’s always about the World Series, it’s never status quo,” says Tim Ritter, who’s followed the team for more than 40 years and lives in Washington Township, N.J.

“There have been some rough years — hello Stump Merrill — but for the most part I always felt there was some shot to win. As a fan that’s all you can ask for.”

What the fans got this year was something straight out of a baseball fantasy: a team that offered a strong glimpse of what might be across the next decade (Luis Severino, Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, even a taste of Clint Frazier) with a team good enough to win 91 games, good enough to knock off the defending American League champion Indians, good enough to square off with the Astros starting Friday in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series.

With a few dashes mixed in of zaniness (the “Toe-night Show” silliness in the dugout after home runs), humor (the thumbs-down craze that is now the team slogan) and just plain politeness (I defy you to talk to Judge or Didi Gregorius or Todd Frazier, among many others, and find even one good reason to dislike any of them).

It’s a rare mix. Across town, Mets fans got a similar ride two years ago when the Mets landed in the World Series a year or two ahead of schedule, also with a band of likeable players who kept picking up momentum. It was a feel-good rush that lasted less than two years. It can be fleeting. But you get the sense from the Yankees that their ride won’t be.

“I feel like this wasn’t luck, this was planning,” says Roberto Alvarado, a paralegal who lives on Long Island. “And I can’t wait to see where it all goes.”

Still: That was the easy constituency to please. Yankees fans are tough, demanding, occasionally spoiled, occasionally arrogant, but they aren’t ever going to really cut bait with the team. They may like this team better, deeper, more zealously, but they’ve never stopped wanting them to win.

The curious dynamic involves folks like Darren Frank, and they are plentiful, too: people who, in a normal year, wear T-shirts that read “My favorite two teams are the Royals (to pick one team of any) and whoever is playing the Yankees.” They are the ones who have shouted from rooftops for decades — whether it’s 1928 or 1939 or 1949 or 1958 or 1961 or 1978 or 2000 — “BREAK UP THE YANKEES!”

This all may have started as a quaint parochial affair, the interborough rivalries of Bronx (Yankees) and Manhattan (Giants) and Brooklyn (Dodgers) and, later, Queens, with the Mets. They used to say in Brooklyn that for every one citizen who wanted the Dodgers to win there were three who wanted the Giants to lose; lately you can probably figure out similar arithmetic with the Mets and Yankees.

But the Yankees have always burst beyond the tight boundaries of their city. You’ll find Yankees fans, literally, everywhere, wearing jackets in Beijing, caps in London, jerseys in Belgium. But you’ll find just as many who detest them, too, in all 50 states and to counteract every international fan.

Maybe there are a few popular European soccer teams like that, or some Indian cricket clubs, but in the context of American sports it’s harder to find, even for the kind of successful teams that engender such polarization. There aren’t a lot of people who’ve enjoyed hating Lombardi’s Packers or Bradshaw’s Steelers or Montana’s 49ers. There aren’t a lot of Celtics haters in Boise, Idaho.

Maybe the Patriots come the closest to this bipolar attraction, but there has never been a sense this wasn’t transient. After all, the Belichick-Brady run began in 200102 when they were a cute underdog at a time when America could use one, and also at a time when America had grown weary of the St. Louis Rams. Check back in 15 years if there’s still an army of Anti-Pats. But the Yankees … well. “I don’t want them to win, let me be clear,” says Tom Catafano, who describes himself as a “loyal Mets fan, despite it all.” “But,” he says, “for the first time in my life I don’t want them to lose every game 10-0. That’s progress, right?”

It isn’t that the Yankees ever truly convert those on the other side — and, frankly, most Yankee fans will tell you those back-and-forth bandwagon conventioneers aren’t particularly welcome among the faithful. But there have been times when you might’ve caught one of those dissenters not traditionally engaged in rooting for their doom.

The 2001 playoffs spring to mind, of course, for reasons beyond the ballfield. The ’96 Yankees were like that, too, grinders whose T-shirt motto of choice —“We Play Today, We Win Today, Das It” — was hard to argue with, featuring players that really just never ticked you off.

Until they won too much, of course.

Which is, in all likelihood, the same fate that will befall this core soon enough — maybe as soon as next week if things shake out a certain way against the Astros.

“I kind of look forward to hating them again,” Darren Frank said.