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The Yankees are in the World Series. Some of their biggest haters are in NYC.
By
Jamie McClellan
Published Oct 25, 2024
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By
Jamie McClellan
Published Oct 25, 2024
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The New York Yankees are back in the World Series for the first time in 15 years, and will face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 on Friday night.
But with their record 27 championships, stretches of near-invincibility over the years, and practically peerless financial might, the Bronx Bombers have made plenty of enemies, even within New York's ostensibly friendly confines.
One might think that the Yankees' slight drought these past 15 years would have softened the animosity directed at the team, but these feelings run deep, sometimes dividing families.
Take Nick and Jake Bader, twins from Tribeca whose loyalties are split. Nick loves the Yankees, but his brother Jake and their father root for the Mets.
“My hatred for the Yankees is about at an all-time high right now,” Jake Bader said with a laugh in a phone call on Wednesday. “And it has nothing to do with my brother.”
He added that Yankees fans “act like they’re still on top, but they haven’t won anything in 15 years.”
Their father, however, surprised them both by deciding to root for the Yankees in the World Series, mostly to support his city.
Other Mets fans said that, while they love their city, that alone can not bring them to root for their cross-town rivals.
Julie Moses, a die-hard Mets fan from Long Island, said she couldn’t support the Yankees, but said she’d seen some Mets fans choose to do so in the run-up to the World Series.
“I have a brother-in-law who, as we were watching the Mets lose, said, ‘well, at least we have the Yankees,” Moses recalled, with a hint of disdain in her voice. “He considers himself just a New York fan. To me, it’s just a cop-out.”
Other New Yorkers were rooting against the Yankees because they’re loyal to their former New York City team: the Dodgers, who moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958.
Jim Welsh of Bay Ridge roots for the Dodgers.
Photo by Carol Welsh
Like Jim Welsh of Bay Ridge, who still supports the Dodgers from across the country.
The Dodgers, he said, “were a team for blue-collar Brooklyn." But Yankees fans "paraded around with their noses in the air.”
Other Brooklynites echoed this antipathy.
“I always disliked the Yankees," said Steve Shestakofsky, who grew up in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn. But he said he never forgave the Dodgers for leaving New York, and found that he “just couldn’t support either team.”
Charles Komanoff is a Yankees fan. But it took decades.
Photo by Marta Kuhn
Still, some fans, like, Charles Komanoff, 77, said their allegiances have evolved. Komanoff grew up in Long Beach, New York, and started out as a Brooklyn fan. He even rooted for them during their first few years in LA, before falling out of love with baseball for a time.
But the Yankees grew on him after he moved to Manhattan in the late '60s. In fact, he can pinpoint the exact moment he gave himself over to the pinstripes: Game 3 of the 1978 World Series at Yankee Stadium, which was also a matchup between the Yankees and Dodgers. Komanoff attended the game and estimates that he was 99% a Yankees fan at that point.
“I was actually feeling a tiny bit ambivalent,” Komanoff said. ”But being in the midst of 60,000 rabid, die-hard Yankees fans just screaming when the Yankees took the field, it swept me up.”
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new york city
sports
Jamie McClellan
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