Yankees Baseball Quotes

It ain't over 'til it's over.

Red Sox looked around Jane at the patient, “Your mind reading coming back?” “With her? Sometimes?” “Huh. You getting anything from anyone else?” “Nope.” Red Sox repositioned his hat. “Well, ah…let me know if you pick up shit from me, k? There are some things that I’d prefer to keep private, feel me?” “Roger that. Although I can’t help it sometimes.” “Which is why I’m going to take up thinking about baseball when you’re around.” “Thank fuck you’re not a Yankees fan.” “Don’t use the Y-word. We’re in mixed company.

The guy stroked his goatee. “What do you call twenty guys watching the World Series?” “The New York Yankees,” Butch replied. The vampire laughed in a loud burst, whipped the baseball cap off his head, and slapped it on his thigh.

The Yankees' Facebook page was hacked. The hacker was immediately purchased and signed to a 5 year contract with the Yankees.

... there’s almost nothing worse than spending an entire day anticipating watching a Yankees vs. Red Sox game, only to have the score be 9-0 in the third inning.

Mr. Normal stepped forward and offered him a Scotch bottle. "You look like you could use some." Yeah, you think? Butch took a swig. "Thanks." "So can we kill him now?" said the one with the goatee and the baseball hat. Beth's man spoke harshly. "Back off, V." "Why? He's just a human." "And my shellan is half-human. The man doesn't die just because he's not one of us." "Jesus, you've changed your tune." "So you need to catch up, brother." Butch got to his feet. If his death was going to be debated, he wanted in on the discussion. "I appreciate the support," he said to Beth's boy. "But I don't need it." He went over to the guy with the hat, discreetly switching his grip on the bottle's neck in case he had to crack the damn thing over a head. He moved in tight, so their noses were almost touching. He could feel the vampire heating up, priming for a fight. "I'm happy to take you on, asshole," Butch said. "I'll probably end up losing, but I fight dirty, so I'll make you hurt while you kill me." Then he eyed the guy's hat. "Though I hate clocking the shit out of another Red Sox fan." There was a shout of laughter from behind him. Someone said, "This is gonna be fun to watch." The guy in front of Butch narrowed his eyes into slits. "You true about the Sox?" "Born and raised in Southie. Haven't stopped grinning since '04." There was a long pause. The vampire snorted. "I don't like humans." "Yeah, well, I'm not too crazy about you bloodsuckers." Another stretch of silence. The guy stroked his goatee. "What do you call twenty guys watching the World Series?" "The New York Yankees," Butch replied. The vampire laughed in a loud burst, whipped the baseball cap off his head, and slapped it on his thigh. Just like that, the tension was broken.

Dear ignoramuses, Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance. Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that. Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

He looked nearly inconspicuous, a handsome man in faded Levi’s and tennis shoes. A Yankees baseball cap covered his dark hair, the bill shadowing his features. Casual. Beautiful. A day’s growth of beard on his jaw did little to detract from his excruciating attractiveness. “She’s eight months old, but she knows how to flirt,” the baby’s mother said. “Let go of the nice man’s shirt, Gabbi.” She dislodged the child’s hand, then told Adrian, “I’m sorry. She must like the colors on your T-shirt.” Eight-month-old Gabbi’s big blue eyes were fixed on Adrian’s face, not on his T-shirt. Billie released a shaky breath. Good God. Even babies weren’t immune.

One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.

Losing is a learning experience. It teaches you humility. It teaches you to work harder. It’s also a powerful motivator.

When I come back you can tell me about the baseball.” “The Yankees cannot lose.” “But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.” “Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.

Yogi Berra, the fabled Yankee baseball player and manager, was said to have pointed out, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” That is so true about brands; you need to know where they are to end up.

World Series MVP is a unique individual honor because with one exception—Bobby Richardson won 1960 World Series MVP honors for the Yankees, but the Pittsburgh Pirates won the Series that year—by virtue of winning the award you guarantee your teammates have won a ring.

Researchers measure that the average major-league pitcher puts 40 pounds of pressure on his shoulder by cocking and releasing the baseball. Curious how much more the body could take, those same researchers tested cadavers. The shoulder broke apart at just beyond 40 pounds.

It’s Curt Schilling and his bloody sock staring down the Yankees in the Bronx. It’s Derek Lowe taking the mound the very next night to complete the most improbable comeback in baseball history—and then seven days later clinching the World Series. It’s Pedro Martinez and his six hitless innings of postseason relief against the Indians. Yes, it is also Cy Young and Roger Clemens, and the 192 wins in a Red Sox uniform that they share—the perfect game for Young, the 20 strikeout games for Clemens—but it is also Bill Dinneen clinching the 1903 World Series with a busted, bloody hand, and Jose Santiago shutting down Minnesota with two games left in the season to keep the 1967 Impossible Dream alive, and Jim Lonborg clinching the Impossible Dream the very next day, and Jim Lonborg again, tossing a one-hitter and a three-hitter in the 1967 World Series, and Luis Tiant in the 1975 postseason, shutting out Oakland and Cincinnati in back-to-back starts. They are all winners.

You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life. This is a team for the cab driver who gets held up and the guy who loses out on a promotion because he didn't maneuver himself to lunch with the boss enough. It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?

David had an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball that Kramer admired, and an unusual dedication to the Yankees for a guy that grew up in Brooklyn, which was Dodgers territory.

Jones learned his changeup, or at least observed its grip for the first time, from a future fictional closer. Willie Mueller pitched briefly for the Brewers in 1978 and 1981 but is best known for a role in Major League as Duke Simpson, the menacing Yankees reliever. Bob Uecker, playing broadcaster Harry Doyle, noted that Duke was so mean, he threw at his own kid in a father-son game.

Baseball is known for superstitious players and cursed teams—and at the root of every curse there’s a story. Boston’s curse was to trade Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Cubs fans claim a billy goat is responsible for their futility. And Cleveland’s curse? The club struggled after its Pennant-winning 1954 season, but it was rich with optimism just two years later as an onslaught of new talent promised to lift the club once more to the ranks of baseball’s elite—and by 1959 the club was contending for the Pennant again. And then GM Frank Lane traded Rocky Colavito to the Detroit Tigers and cursed everything.

Once, while living in New York City in the early 2000s, I was asked to leave a sports bar because the Yankees were playing my hometown Red Sox on TV and I lost my cool at a guy who was loudly dissing them. I yelled, “Derek Jeter is baseball’s Hitler!

the Yankees were playing my hometown Red Sox on TV and I lost my cool at a guy who was loudly dissing them. I yelled, “Derek Jeter is baseball’s Hitler!” This was in New York City. In a room full of Jewish sports fans. I don’t even really like baseball that much! I have problems.

For that matter I didn't understand Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn't follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.

Zoe, I--Oh, God!" he shouted, clutching his chest and stumbling back. "What?" she asked, looking around anxiously as she clutched a large brown muffin against her chest. With a shaky hand, he pointed at the offending item that she dared bring into his house. "What the hell is that?" She looked down and frowned. "My muffin?" "How could you?" he demanded hoarsely as he shook his head in disgust. "What the hell are you freaking out about?" she demanded, looking around again. "That shirt!" he said, pointing wildly towards the Red Sox shirt that she dared to wear in his presence. "What the hell were you thinking?

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

That flag’s not just the emblem of being a racist asshole, a club to which your daddy probably belongs happily. But it’s also the Confederate flag. The one carried by Southerners to say to the Yankees—that’s your daddy, a Yankee—‘Don’t tread on me or I’ll pop a musket ball up your ass.’ Northerners driving around with the Dixie flag is like a Jew wearing a ‘Go Hitler!’ baseball cap.” Jonesy’s

some people might argue that a fan who roots for a losing franchise isn't a very smart fan, but you have to be pretty crafty in the head to continually enjoy cubs baseball. who do you think is smarter? the Yankees fan who can't be happy just getting to the World Series? or the Cubs fan, who can somehow manage to have the best summer of his life watching his team finish 17 games out of first place

Loomis, the longest-tenured Time, Inc., employee, still worked at the magazine while I was researching this book, and when I asked her about Cobb, with whom she’d also gone on a second date to an old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, she directed me toward a memoir she’d written in which she described him as “smart and gentlemanly.” He’d been deeply impressed, she said, with her knowledge of baseball.

New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That's right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer one...just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets--who next year need to just shut the hell up and play. Now, me personally, I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during halftime. and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned by eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it--who doesn't love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flatscreen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister? It's no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl--that's forty million more than go to church on Christmas--suck on that, Jesus! It's also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in. Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don't want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they'd like it if some kids didn't have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, "achieving the American dream" is easy for some and just a fantasy for others. That's why the NFL literally shares the wealth--TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success." Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don't just mean it's incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody--but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees' is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance as getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. So you kind of have to laugh--the same angry white males who hate Obama because he's "redistributing wealth" just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

Who’s winning?” “I don’t have a f*cking clue nor do I f*cking care.” Echo’s head ticks back. “Back off, Beth.” I cross the room, drop a kiss on the curve of Echo’s neck and whisper in her ear, “She’d rip me to pieces, too, right now. She’s a b*tch when the Yankees play.” Her eyebrows rise. “Is she a Red Sox fan?” Isaiah chuckles and we both throw him a glare, but he doesn’t notice as he’s absorbed in a car manual. “Beth hates baseball.” Echo’s eyes dart from Beth to the television to me then she waves her hand in the air for an explanation. “She watches,” I explain. “Yankees only. It’s what she does and there are some things we don’t question about each other.” “Just the Yankees?” Echo whispers. “Just the Yankees,” I repeat. “And she hates baseball?” “With a passion.” “That’s...” Echo says in a hushed tone. “That’s messed up.

Why would anyone want to fight Henry?" Loondorf looked hurt. "Because he's a ballplayer." "So?" "So he's a baller. He's got cash, chains, crisp clothes. He's got a hat that says Yankees and it's the real deal, yo. He didn't buy it at no yard sale. He walks into a bar and girls are like damn. Dudes get jealous. They want to get in his face, prove they're somebody." "They want to take down the man," Steve said helpfully.

In 1971, the Yankees hired Bill White, making him baseball’s first black broadcaster. Everyone was so proud of him. Over the years we had seen Bill quite a bit starting from the days when he played with the Cardinals, then in spring training at St. Petersburg, and later whenever we went home to St. Louis. When Bill came to the Yankees, he knew little about the American League players. So Elston naturally was the first person he went to that spring training.

I opened the curtain and entered the confessional, a dark wooden booth built into the side wall of the church. As I knelt on the small worn bench, I could hear a boy's halting confession through the wall, his prescribed penance inaudible as the panel slid open on my side and the priest directed his attention to me. "Yes, my child," he inquired softly. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my First Confession." "Yes, my child, and what sins have you committed?" .... "I talked in church twenty times, I disobeyed my mother five times, I wished harm to others several times, I told a fib three times, I talked back to my teacher twice." I held my breath. "And to whom did you wish harm?" My scheme had failed. He had picked out the one group of sins that most troubled me. Speaking as softly as I could, I made my admission. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds." "The Yankee pitcher?" he asked, surprise and concern in his voice. "And how did you wish to harm him?" "I wanted him to break his arm." "And how often did you make this wish?" "Every night," I admitted, "before going to bed, in my prayers." "And were there others?" "Oh, yes," I admitted. "I wished that Robin Roberts of the Phillies would fall down the steps of his stoop, and that Richie Ashburn would break his hand." "Is there anything else?" "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee." But, I hastened to add, "I wished that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended." ... "Are there any other sins, my child?" "No, Father." "For your penance, say two Hail Mary's, three Our Fathers, and," he added with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers. ...

It was a project of mine to replace the tournament with something which might furnish an escape for the extra steam of the chivalry, keep those bucks entertained and out of mischief, and at the same time preserve the best thing in them, which was their hardy spirit of emulation. I had had a choice band of them in private training for some time, and the date was now arriving for their first public effort. This experiment was baseball. In order to give the thing vogue from the start, and place it out of the reach of criticism, I chose my nines by rank, not capacity. There wasn’t a knight in either team who wasn’t a sceptered sovereign.

There has been considerable discussion as to how much, in cold cash, Lou Gehrig actually cost the New York Yankees. According to Gehrig, he received $500 for making the momentous decision to sign a contract with organized baseball. That $500 was the biggest sum of money that any of the Gehrigs had ever seen. It came at a time when it was desperately needed. It paid rent and doctors and hospital bills and nurses. It represented a sacrifice made by Gehrig, freely and unheroically and untheatrically. For that sorely needed $500 he sold his right and his chance to go on into that other world around whose fringes he had played the last two years.

Rewriting the baseball record book must be very fulfilling. Or maybe not. Yankees outfielder Roger Maris knew firsthand the fickle nature of success. After an MVP season in 1960—when he hit 39 homers and drove in a league-high 112 runs—Maris began a historic assault on one of baseball’s most imposing records: Babe Ruth’s single-season home run mark of 60. In the thirty-three seasons since the Bambino had set the standard, only a handful of players had come close when Jimmie Foxx in 1932 and Hank Greenberg in 1938 each hit 58. Hack Wilson, in 1930, slammed 56. But in 1961, Maris—playing in “The House That Ruth Built”—launched 61 home runs to surpass baseball’s most legendary slugger. Surprisingly, the achievement angered fans who seemed to feel Maris lacked the appropriate credentials to unseat Ruth. Some record books reminded readers that the native Minnesotan had accomplished his feat in a season eight games longer than Ruth’s. Major League Baseball, due to expansion, changed the traditional 154-game season to 162 games with the 1961 season. Of the new home run record, Maris said, “All it ever brought me was trouble.” Human achievements can be that way. Apart from God, the things we most desire can become empty and unfulfilling—even frustrating—as the writer of Ecclesiastes noted. “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income,” he wrote (5:10). “Everyone’s toil is for their mouth,” he added, “yet their appetite is never satisfied” (6:7). But the Bible also shows where real satisfaction is found, in what Ecclesiastes calls “the conclusion of the matter.” Fulfillment comes to those who “fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13).

For a hitter, there’s no thrill quite like a late inning, game-changing home run. Unless, that is, the shot is called back. On July 24, 1983, Kansas City superstar George Brett was riding high after hitting a two-out, two-run homer in Yankee Stadium. The future Hall of Famer’s blast changed a 4–3 ninth inning deficit into a 5–4 Royals lead. The joy soon faded, though, when New York manager Billy Martin asked home plate umpire Tim McClelland to inspect Brett’s bat. Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed that Brett seemed to use more pine tar than the rules allowed—and Martin had saved that choice information for just such a moment as this. McClelland measured the goo on Brett’s bat, finding it exceeded the eighteen inches allowed. Brett was called out, erasing the home run and giving the Yankees a 4–3 victory. The Royals were incensed by the ruling, which was later overturned by American League president Lee McPhail, who said “games should be won and lost on the playing field—not through technicalities of the rules.” Baseball’s official acknowledgment of the “bigger picture” is reminiscent of Jesus’ approach to God’s laws. Arguing with hypocritical Pharisees, Jesus once said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former” (Matthew 23:23). Our concern for the letter of the law should be balanced by an equal concern for the spirit of the law. If you’re inclined to spiritual pickiness, don’t forget the “more important matters.

In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager. Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980. Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?” Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him? “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said. “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.” And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance. “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.” One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?” Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of

I developed an interest in major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I’m concerned (with a nod to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan. They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New York than Boston, and that’s where our loyalties went. And what was not to love? The Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond.

Yankees.

Subway Series is a series of baseball games between two New York City teams, since fans can reach the stadiums via subway trains. The first Subway Series were played as World Series games. For example, the Yankees played the New York Giants in 1921, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941. More recently, the Mets and the Yankees have been playing Subway Series games during the regular season. They typically play groups of two or three games at each team’s stadium. The Mets and the Yankees competed in a World Series Subway Series in 2000, and the Yankees won in five games.

were one of the worst teams in the league. They lost game after game. They didn’t come close to winning a World Series. But Babe Ruth turned their luck around. After he became a New York Yankee, things would never be the same. Within a few years of buying Babe Ruth, the Yankees won the first of dozens of World Series. On the Yankees, Ruth hit even more home runs. In 1920, Ruth was one of the most famous people in America. He hit an amazing fifty-four home runs that year. That’s twenty-five more than he had hit the year before. Fifty-four home runs was more than most teams had!

Anthony Cafaro has been a sports fan his whole life. His favorite teams include the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays. Anthony Cafaro played travel baseball and golf in high school and still remains active in recreational basketball. As a finance major, he looks forward to a lucrative career with a strong company.

Baseball is just a game. But like religion, it has rituals. I need rituals. I need traditions. I need something to believe in, whether I worship in a church or a stadium. I believe in the Yankees and then divorced them and came all the way back to believing in them again, and what I have learned, if anything, is this: My belief, my faith, transcends individual players and is deeper than the outcome of any game, any season. It is unshakable.

This was the greatest day ever. This morning as you walked to school, you saved a child’s life by pulling him out of the way of an oncoming bus. Then you got an A-plus on a huge biology test even though you studied for only forty-five seconds. Then you were named Student of the Millennium in your school. With the award you were given a brand-new sports car, an all-expenses-paid trip to the moon, and a statue of yourself that will grace the courtyard at your school for all eternity. Then you hit the game-winning home run for your school’s baseball team. There happened to be a major-league scout in the stands, and he wants you to be the new cleanup hitter for the New York Yankees. Your starting salary will be eight billion dollars. What a day! It was so good that you went home that night, sat on your bed, and told . . . no one. Of course not! If you had a day like that, you would tell everyone! You’d throw a party for six hundred of your closest friends to announce what happened. Right? Well, becoming a Christian is actually way better than all of those things. The statue and the eight billion dollars will fade away some day. But the decision to follow Jesus will mean something for all eternity.

The smile wasn’t there at the beginning. In a few of the early pictures, you can see a derisive smirk beginning to curl up on the right side of Jeter’s face, almost as though the young player had found a cocky persona and was trying it on for size. Still, he didn’t use the smirk for his first glossy publicity shots with the Yankees or the pictures on his rookie-year baseball cards. Not quite scowling—although his eyebrows angle down in a V that aims the viewer’s eye at the unsmiling center of his face—he looks … serious, I guess, in those early photographs. Unswerving. A young man with an almost childish openness about his furious drive and discipline. A young man who allowed the outward projection of his public ambitions to show on his face. By 1999,

Sydowski and his father had good seats at the Coliseum. Thirty rows up from first. But the game lacked zeal. Entering the eighth, with the A’s up by seven over the Yankees, was not exciting baseball.

Do you remember when we discussed the horseshoe theory of politics?” “Yes, of course.” “We talked about how most Americans used to be in the middle, relatively speaking. That’s how America kept its balance all those years. The left and the right were close enough to have disagreements but not hate.” “Okay.” “That world is gone, Gavin, and so it will now be easy to destroy the social order. The middle has become complacent. They are smart, but they are lazy. They see the grays. They get the other side. Extremists, on the other hand, see only black and white. They are not only certain that their vision is absolutely correct, but they are incapable of even understanding the other side. Those who don’t believe as they do are lesser in every way, and so they will kill for that vision. I get those people, Gavin. And I want to create more of them by forcing those in the middle to choose a side. I want to make them extremists too.” “Why?” “Extremists are relentless. They don’t see right or wrong—they see us and them. You’re a baseball fan, aren’t you, Gavin?” “I am.” “A Yankee fan, right?” “So?” “So if you found out the Yankee manager cheated or that all your favorite Yankees took steroids, would you then become a Red Sox fan?” Gavin said nothing. “Well?” “Probably not.” “Exactly. The Yankees could never do anything that would make you a Red Sox fan. That’s the power I want to harness. I read a quote recently from Werner Herzog. You know who he is?” “The German film director.” “Right. He said that America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.” Rusty put his hand on Gavin’s shoulder. “You and I are going to change the world, my friend.” He leaned forward. “Drop me off up ahead on the next corner.

In 1973, the New York Yankees became the first team to use a designated hitter (often referred to as the “DH”).

CBS spent much of the 1960s and 1970s taking the enormous cash flow generated by its network and broadcast operations and funding an aggressive acquisition program that led it into entirely new fields, including the purchase of a toy business and the New York Yankees baseball team. CBS issued stock to fund some of these acquisitions, built a landmark office building in midtown Manhattan at enormous expense, developed a corporate structure with forty-two presidents and vice presidents, and generally displayed what Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, calls “a prosperity-blinded indifference to unnecessary costs.”1

11: Marilyn and DiMaggio attend an opening day baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Marilyn is photographed watching the action.

When you think of baseball, you immediately think of the New York Yankees. When you think of golf, Bobby Jones comes to mind. When you think of boxing, it's Joe Louis. One of these days when people think of football, I want them to think of the Cleveland Browns.

Whats the 1st thing that happens after you put on Pinstripes ? . . . . . You Become Over Rated !

Speaking of baseball, a small group of Nautilus crew members arrived during a game at Yankee Stadium. Even though the famous slugger Mickey Mantle was at bat, the crowd stood and gave the submariners a standing ovation.

In 1946, the New York Yankees made headlines by being the first baseball team to travel by plane.

In February of 1921, the Yankees purchased 10 acres of property from the estate of William Waldorf Astoria at 161st St and River Ave in the west Bronx, directly across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds. Yankees owner Rupert and Tillinghast Huston announced the construction of baseball's first triple-decked structure. With a capacity of over 70,000, it would also be the first structure to be called a "stadium.

At seasons end the Yankees retired Gehrig's No. 4, making his the first retired number in baseball.

A total of 56 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame have been associated with the New York Yankees at one time or another as a player, manager, or front office executive - the highest representation of any other team.

from some of the Yankees when they all went to a baseball game together.

It wasn’t as outside as they wanted. Sisler drove it over the left-field fence. The Whiz Kids were going to the 1950 World Series. They lost. The Yankees of Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Phil Rizzuto swept them in four games. The Yanks had their second consecutive World Series title and thirteenth overall; the Phillies were still looking for their first. They had scored all of four runs while getting swept in the last all-Caucasian World Series. (Mays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompson would play for the New York Giants in the 1951 Series.) Still, they rode the train home to a heroes’ welcome at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station. The Whiz Kids were National League champions, the youngest club in the league, with better years in store, they thought.

And finally they offered that heart-breaking pair of ball busters, George Herman Ruth and Henry Louis Gehrig. Did you ever see them play? Brother, you saw a ball team. You also saw as grand and mad and wild, and goofy a collection of baseball ivory as was ever collected together under one tent. This isn’t designed particularly as a Sunday School take for tiny tots, so I’ll tell you with considerable joy in the telling that the Yanks of those years were a drinking ball club. They like their likker. And they gave Miller Huggins many a headache. But drinks or no drinks, they won those pennants and those world series games, and they patted that apple.

When baseball is bread and butter, you never question a man’s eccentricities as long as he continues to carry his weight and can hoist one into Railroad Street outside the park, when blue chips are down. I’m trying to give you a picture of those Yanks, and of Lou. And I am also trying to give you an unnamby-pamby picture of baseball as it is, or at least as it was in those days. It isn’t a game played for the sweet joy of sport by Sunday School book characters, but a rough, competitive game played as a profession and a business by a bunch of tough, hard bitted men who were and are just like any other groups of men. In a group of twenty or thirty players you find all kinds. That Lou Gehrig was an ascetic, practically, in his manner of living, was purely a matter of his own personal choice. No one actually demanded it of him.

Renowned for his courtesy and assertiveness, Frank Zebzda is focused on his dual careers as a therapist and paramedic. A passionate New York Yankees fan, Frank also enjoys soccer, baseball, basketball, and campfires. Inspired by his addiction recovery, he is determined to guide others in overcoming challenges and achieving a brighter future.

But Biju went to Jackson Heights, and from a store like a hangar he bought: a TV and VCR, a camera, sunglasses, baseball caps that said "NYC" and "Yankees" and "I Like My Beer Cold and My Women Hot," a digital two-time clock and radio and cassette player, waterproof watches, calculators, an electric razor, a toaster oven, a winter coat, nylon sweaters, polyester-cotton-blend shirts, a polyurethane quilt, a rain jacket, a folding umbrella, suede shoes, a leather wallet, a Japanese-made heater, a set of sharp knives, a hot water bottle, Fixodent, saffron, cashews and raisins, aftershave, T-shirts with "I love NY" and "Born in the USA" picked out in shiny stones, whiskey, and, after a moment of hesitation, a bottle of perfume called Windsong . . . who was that for? He didn’t yet know her face.

Pride of the Yankees invented the visual grammar of the baseball film, discovering and employing editing techniques to turn a movie star with little baseball experience into a reasonable facsimile of one of the most talented players of all time. In later years, these techniques were used to make actors as disparate as John Cusack (Eight Men Out), Rosie O’Donnell (A League of Their Own), and Bernie Mac (Mr. 3000) look like they’re zinging line drives all over the field.