The Yankee Guy Followup Post; Or Even More Ways to Piss Off BSMW

Hey Red Sox Nation, how y'all doing? I'm fine, thanks.

I wanted to take the time to answer some of your questions and accusations. I didn't want to misrepresent myself any further than I already had in my previous post. I freely admit that the piece I wrote on Thursday was a little rough. It definitely could have used tighter editing and some proofreading, among other things.

This started out as a response to Rick in the comments section of that post, but as per usual I wrote way too much. I do go on a bit, and it just became too cumbersome to use as a simple response. I figured to just put up an actual post to clear the air.

Thanks go to Rick, by the way, for having actual substance in his critique, instead of just saying "this guy likes the Yankees- he must be an idiot." That's not a very productive way to open dialogue. You all are certainly allowed to disagree with the things that I wrote, or even to think that I actually am an idiot; it is a free country, after all. But if you based your entire judgment on the fact that I rooted for a different sports team, that would be patently ridiculous. For one thing, you're not going to get very far in this world if you only associate with people who agree with everything you say. For another (much more important) thing, I wouldn't stick up for Curt Schilling even if I were a Red Sox fan. I just wouldn't. I don't have double standards for asshole players just because they play for my team. You don't know me from a hole in the wall, but I can assure you that this is the case. I could come up with a laundry list of Yankees who I can't stand, and Yankee transgressions that I wouldn't dream of defending. Paul O'Neill was one of the biggest assholes who ever laced up a pair of spikes. David Wells was a half-drunk idiot who wasted his talent AND was friends with Mark Fuhrman. I could write a book on how much I hate A-Rod. Roger Clemens? Bitch, please. You get the idea.

Anyway, on to my stirring defense of myself:

1) I think one of the operative premises of the piece--that Schilling's “Yankees suck this year” equals Duncan's "Red Sox suck" is pretty specious.

No, they are not exactly the same. It was never my intention to present these two incidents as exactly interchangeable, but I believed that there were enough similarities to make a decent comparison. I would not describe this as "specious."

The former is pretty much point of fact when you're looking at their record which I'm pretty sure was his point, the latter is trash talk that I'm sure Schilling finds unbecoming of a kid who hasn't 'paid his dues' yet, etc.

They’re both trash talk. One is just trash talk that you enjoy hearing. As I said in my piece, I do not dispute the fact that the Yankees do, indeed, suck this season. They have the highest payroll in the sport yet they’re barely a .500 team. Their massive suckitude is not even worth debating at this point.

No, the disconnect for me comes from the fact that this is weak, puerile trash-talk from a guy (Schilling) who's preaching to the choir (the WEEI audience). This kind of crap is, frankly, not a worthy comment from a man of his station. We fans can say shit like this, and who really cares? It’s just the fans talking. Schilling is an elder statesman at this point in his career, and should probably be just a bit more diplomatic.

Yes, this is only my opinion. Of course it's only my opinion. I'm writing an article on an internet sports blog. That's where opinions go. This is the way I wish things could be. I wish Curt Schilling was less of an abrasive jackass. Just an opinion, but opinions and passions are the primary currency for sports fans. It's not as if there are mathematical theorems which dictate the teams we should like and the players whose posters go on our walls.

Pompous gasbags wear me out. I’m fed up with Schilling being the guy who gets to decide when someone has paid their dues or not. It seems like Schilling gets to make all of these decisions. When Curt pitches inside, well that's just the way you're supposed to pitch. When an opposing pitcher comes inside on a Sox batter, then it’s “bush league.” The man is thoroughly blind to his own hypocrisy. And somehow I doubt that Shelley Duncan’s boneheaded actions would have been deemed acceptable if he (Duncan) were a 15-year veteran.

People who don’t root for the Sox are tired of Schilling’s act. That can’t be news to anyone. Schilling is the first one to chime in and talk some shit about another team or another fanbase. To his eyes, other teams are always pulling bullshit moves, but the Sox are somehow immune. Unless it's Manny Ramirez, I mean. Manny is fair game.

Did Schilling ever go on Jim Rome's show and call Pedroia bush league for pulling the exact same "slap play" as A-Rod? No? I guess it must have been a hardnosed baseball play when Pedroia did it. That was playing the game the right way, doing what it takes to win.

Whether or not I agree with him (I don't), this comes off as a pretty flimsy excuse to just unload on Schilling.

I'm glad we agree on something, at least. Was it really that flimsy of an excuse, though? Really? Having a flimsy excuse didn't seem to stop Schilling before he decided to damn an entire fanbase as ghoulish creeps. I felt like sticking up for myself and for fans like me. I wrote a rambling letter about it to Tiki, who agreed with me. She told me to expand on it and she’d put it up. I didn't hold a gun to Tiki's head. She thought I made some good points. You disagreed. Tiki either lets me write other pieces, or decides that it's not worth the aggravation. You then get to decide whether or not to read any more of her site. The system works. It's all the same to me. I was just rambling off the cuff; I'm certainly not a pro. Politics never even entered into it, since Tiki and I don't share all of the same beliefs.

2)The whole bit about NE fans being miserable from time immemorial...isn't this the kind of thing that we rightfully call BS on when Shaughnessy trots it out?

Yes, I stretched the truth a bit to make an ironic point, but I didn’t make the entire thing up. A little poetic license. A small dose of absurdity to combat an even more absurd argument from Schilling. Dan Shaughnessy found a kernel of truth and exaggerated it beyond all recognition, but the kernel did exist. I lived in Boston for three years. I met many area sports fans who were bitter. This was back in the early 90s, and much has changed since than, but back then there were definitely some fans who felt this way. The Sox were mediocre, the Pats were also-rans, and Reggie Lewis had just died. It was a tough time to root for the locals.

Shaughnessy invented the "Curse of the Bambino" from whole cloth, but he didn't invent everything. He didn't completely invent the downtrodden nature of some of the fans. Much of that was a media creation, but it's not as if literally ZERO fans felt that way. Some fans were fairly fatalistic. No, not all of the fans. And no, they weren’t nearly as morose as Shank and others made it seem. But there were certainly, you know, some.

This idea really became twisted when writers tried to make it seem as if Sox fans preferred to be miserable; that they were actually unhappy with breaking the string of futility. We all know that that’s nonsense. My original point was only that there was an incredible amount of irony in Boston’s own Curt Schilling calling another fanbase out for being defeatist and miserable.

Either way, I can’t possibly be expected to apologize for disliking Curt Schilling.

3) The whole blue collar thing...silly. On one hand it's coin of the realm for messageboard fans to react like jerks to injury, but on the other hand that's confined to messageboards, but on the other hand everyone this guy talks to feels bad for Brady, but on the other hand all of Boston would be celebrating a Manning dismemberment and that would be okay and as it should be?

I’ll admit that I meandered quite a bit here. It was late, I got a little too stream-of-consciousness, and I was not clear with my intended argument [Hey, I warned Tiki that it was a rough draft]. My argument was not that all NY fans are decent while all Boston fans are jerks who revel in rival players' injuries. I was trying to argue something else entirely. I was trying to say that both sides have their good and bad elements. I took issue with Schilling’s assertion, which seemed to depict a frighteningly large demographic of New Yorkers who were dancing on Brady’s grave (or MCL as it were). I merely meant to say that I hadn’t really seen much of this reaction for myself, not that it wasn’t happening at all. Curt made it sound like this attitude was prevalent. I wanted to show that I hadn’t seen nearly as much of this as Schilling would have us believe. But yes, there were going to be some jerks who did feel that way. You did see the part about Vinny and Vito high-fiving each other, right? I notice you didn’t care much for my name choices there, but since I actually know a Vinny and a Vito, I’m sticking with those.

I don’t literally think that the entire Bay State would be celebrating if the Manning boys were in a crippling car wreck, nor do I think that the Cask N’ Flagon would install confetti cannons on the roof. But there would undoubtedly be some fans, somewhere, who were secretly a little bit happy about it. That’s the nature of fans. Good and bad everywhere.

I like my teams but I don’t like the intense hatred that goes along with some of these rivalries. I don't form personal relationships based on who you root for. I had to stop reading kissingsuzykolber last football season because it just got too disgusting. Between the constant calls for someone to take out Brady’s knees (ulp) and the incessant accusations of Boston racism, I’d had more than enough.

Lotta logical twists and turns there but it seems like the governing tone is "I know better than the blue-collar meatheads do" which I find pretty elitist/whatever word fits and distasteful and that's what really got me irritated w/this piece and compelled me to comment.

This is the one I do have to apologize for. I shouldn’t have said “blue-collar.” It’s not even really what I meant. I wanted to illustrate a certain kind of sports fan, and I settled on a clumsy adjective that didn’t really apply. I wrote it down without even thinking, and didn’t proofread. I was making a broad statement using a convenient generalization. My glibness came back to bite me.

Sometimes generalizations can be useful. Other times they can be inaccurate to the point of offensiveness. For that I am sorry. If it sounded elitist or dismissive, that was never my intention. I have nothing against the working man. My own father was a janitor. My mother had me when she was 17. I used to work in a factory assembling transmission parts. I lived in Oakland, for Christ's sake. I know from humble circumstances.

You know what I'm talking about though, right? There is a kind of sports fan that I was trying to describe. This person does exist, and is worthy of criticism. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. The Yankee Stadium bleacher creature who calls David Ortiz a “fat monkey.” The guy in Colorado who makes slanty eyes and talks in a Long Duk Dong voice when Dice-K pitches (I actually witnessed this at World Series Game 3 last year). The Sox fan who wears a JETER SWALLOWS shirt while attending a game with his 7-year old son. The guy who wants to go to the game, get drunk, and maybe get into a fistfight with a fan of the other team. The guy who won’t stop and help someone whose car has broken down in a rainstorm because the stranded driver is wearing the wrong hat (hello, Bill Simmons). The kind of person who takes sports a little too seriously and acts like a hostile and even violent asshole because of it. Imagine a gay couple holding hands and walking through certain sections of certain stadiums. The guy who gives that couple shit is the guy I was trying to describe.

As you can see, this can apply just as easily to the message board commando as to the belligerent guy in the cheap seats. Both guys are assholes. Both guys’ sense of self-worth is predicated on the success of a sports team combined with the misery of the team’s rivals. I won’t take back “meathead,” because no one should aspire to be one of these. But blue-collar was wrong. I should have thought of a better way to express this. Maybe “classless” would have worked?

So there you go. Sorry if I offended anyone with my "blue-collar" remark. Not sorry for offending fans of Curt Schilling.

And the Yankees still suck.