I am a Yankees fan. I have been since age five, when my dad took me to my first major league baseball game. It was the Yankees against the Rangers. The Yankees won, and Bobby Murcer hit a home run. The year: 1979. It was magical. I was up in the nosebleed seats.
I was living on Governors Island at the time. Two years later, my parents would divorce, and I headed to Norwich, CT—behind enemy lines, in Red Sox territory. I was teased relentlessly for being a Yankees fan, among other things. And those were the dark years for the Yankees, going 15 years between World Series appearances, when Mr. May went 1-for-21 in the 1981 series against the Dodgers. But I kept the faith. Those were the days of such luminaries as Dale Berra and Bobby Meacham and Ken Phelps, not to mention Ed Whitson. Tough time to be a Yankees fan, though I loved watching the Mets beat the Red Sox in 1986 to keep the Curse of the Bambino alive. You hear the one about how Bill Buckner tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a bus? It went between his legs.
The thing about the Yankees is that they have won more championships than any other team in baseball, and it isn’t close. They’ve won 27, though they haven’t won since 2009. They are unlikely to be caught. So if you live in New York, and you are a Yankees fan, you root for the favorite. You root for the favorite to keep on winning. In New York, especially in the late 1990s, there was never enough winning. It was an orgy of winning. And New Yorkers never got enough of it. That’s New York, or at least, it used to be, before it got two Red Sox fans as mayor in succession.
About those mayors. If you are a Red Sox fan, you are not rooting for the favorite. You are rooting for the underdog. Give me your poor, your downtrodden, the lovable losers that keep on losing. That is who you root for. You root for the losers. New York roots for the winners, and Boston roots for the losers. New York has a winning mentality, and Boston has a losing mentality. Of course, that all changed in 2004, and Boston then put together something like a mini-dynasty, under the analytic leadership of Theo Epstein, and the pocketbook of John Henry, but now, that mathematical edge has been arbitraged away. It was funny watching Boston try to get accustomed to the idea of rooting for a winning team, after losing for 100 years. It was like wearing a suit that didn’t quite fit. Being a loser is familiar and comfortable. You get used to it. The Red Sox never quite got used to winning.
That’s just baseball, though. Boston and New York are only a few hundred miles apart, but you could not find two more diametrically opposed cities, philosophically speaking.
Boston is a loyalty town.
New York is an integrity town.
If you have ever met someone from Boston, you know that they have a tight circle of friends, and you know that they will literally murder you if you insult one of them. Remember that scene from Good Will Hunting, when Matt Damon’s mentor is having it out with Robin Williams?
“What problems does he have, Sean, that he is better off as a janitor or in jail or hanging around with a bunch of retarded gorillas?”
“And listen, Gerry, why does he hang out with those retarded gorillas, as you call them? Because any one of those kids would come in here and take a fucking bat to your head if he asked them to. That's called loyalty!”
But you see, that’s not simply Good Will Hunting, that’s Boston. You may be a gorilla, but you’re our gorilla.
We watched this play out in the steroid scandal in baseball. David Ortiz was named on a list of players who had tested positive for steroids. Incredibly, Ortiz denied it, still maintains his innocence (putting aside for the fact that, uh, a piss test doesn’t lie), and the city rallied around him, and he eventually made it to Cooperstown. Boston is a loyalty town. You may be a cheater, but you’re our cheater, and we stand behind you one hundred percent.
Contrast that with what happened to Alex Rodriguez, who also popped positive for the gas. In New York, he was ostracized, because New York is an integrity town. No room for cheaters in New York. The city turned on him, and then some reporter for the New York Post followed him into a hotel elevator in Toronto with a hooker and snapped a picture. And A-Rod has almost 700 home runs and is still not in the Hall of Fame.
Boston is a loyalty town, and New York is an integrity town.
Funny story—years ago, I tweeted about Ortiz and his steroid use, making a joke out of it. A few minutes later, I got an email from a subscriber at a hedge fund—cancel my subscription. As it turns out, the guy was personal friends with David Ortiz, and bought Ortiz’s bullshit story about not taking steroids. He was loyal to Ortiz, so canceled his subscription. I was like, dude, this is just Yankees/Red Sox trash talk, I am by far the first person to call David Ortiz a steroid cheat, but he was having none of it. Well, the hedge fund eventually blew up, so I take some solace in that.
Boston is a loyalty town, and New York is an integrity town.
Nobody from New York is going to take a bat to your head for insulting one of their friends. You think a Wall Street guy is going to do that? You think a Williamsburg hipster is going to do that? Okay, maybe someone from Staten Island would do that. But New Yorkers generally don’t get too exercised about that stuff. It’s because they’re rich and successful, and fuck you. Boston has almost an Appalachian sense of honor, the type of thing you usually see in the lower classes. And Boston is a blue-collar town. There certainly have been a lot of Boston movies. Have any of them been about rich people? There are lots of New York movies and TV shows about rich people. Underdog mentality, loyalty town. Favorite mentality, integrity town.
Where would you rather live?
Things have changed a bit over time. Boston has come up a lot—there has been a lot of development, and the place has achieved a state of real affluence. It’s nice there. It’s not nice in New York anymore, and the Yankees, as I previously mentioned, haven’t won the World Series in 15 years. Giuliani seems to have lost his squash in his later years, but there was nothing better than watching Hizzoner sitting in the mayor’s box in the Bronx for every playoff game. You knew they were going to win. And when Bush threw a BB for the first pitch after 9/11, you knew that New York was going to win. New York was unstoppable. I no longer get that sense, not after eight years of a Red Communist as mayor and the city being devastated by the pandemic. In the epic battle between James Altucher and Jerry Seinfeld, I have to side with Altucher, scammer that he is. New York has lost its soul, its winning spirit. De Blasio killed it, the fucking jerkoff. And politically speaking, there is no Giuliani or Bloomberg on the horizon. There is nothing even resembling a competent manager. I couldn’t be more bearish. Boston, on the other hand is habitable and downright civilized.
New Yorkers used to keep rooting for the winners to keep on winning. Been to a Yankees game recently, in the new Yankee Stadium? Quiet as a tomb. The worst fans in baseball. I remember the days when the old Yankee Stadium would be downright shaking, louder than a jet taking off. Those are the memories I keep of New York. I hold them close.
Fenway. There's nothing like it. I grew up in Brooklyn a Mets fan. 1969 was something else. Moved to Boston. The Red Sox were simply awful. But Fenway was/is magical. I haven't gone there in a while, but seeing that beautiful green grass under the lights. on a summer night. And if you get great seats, you're so close to the field - the Field of Dreams.