Why I Cheer When The Yankees Lose

I love to hate the New York Yankees. Always have. This year, my love for hating the Yankees was eclipsed, slightly, by my love for cheering for the Detroit Tigers.  My first baseball game was a Detroit Tigers game with my grandpa and uncle and dad and no matter where I move, I remain loyal to the Tigers of my youth.

And I remain in eternal antipathy of the Dread Yankees.

It doesn’t make sense, really.  What did New York ever do to me?  The thing is, I grew up a Prairie Populist.  Don’t blame my folks, it’s something I picked up along the way.  I grew up among wheat fields along railroad tracks, and devoured the history of exploitation by the Minneapolis millers and New York banks.  Good healthy Americans—and Immigrants wanting to become Americans—fled the slums of the City to build a paradise in the Great American Desert.

We could be great, you see, if like the colonists shrugged off King George and the Redcoats, we could shrug off the yoke of East Coast oppression.  We root for Main Street over Wall Street, and for Anybody but the Yankees.

So please excuse my shallow glee as the Boys of October skulk back to the Bronx.  This harvest is our own.