How I Can Be Both a Democrat and a Yankee Fan

Robert F. Kennedy and Mickey Mantle, 1965

People have asked me how I can be both a Yankee Fan and a Democrat.

The pairing doesn't seem to make sense. The New York Yankees, more than any other sports team in the Western Hemisphere, represent money and entitlement, just like the Republicans. And, just as the Republicans decided in 1964 that, if the Democrats don't want racists in their party anymore, we'll be happy to take them, the Yankees were slow to integrate: Of the "original" 16 Major League Baseball teams, the only ones that took longer than the Yankees (in 1955) were the Philadelphia Phillies (in 1957), the Detroit Tigers (in 1958), and the Boston Red Sox (in 1959).

In contrast, the Democratic Party has long stood for the underdogs, the poor, the victims of various forms of bigotry. If I'm going to be a Democrat, in a metropolitan area with 2 different teams, then I should support the team with the perennial underdog status: The New York Mets.

So... Why am I a Democrat? It was partly because of my family. My parents were both Kennedy New Frontier Democrats. My mother's parents were FDR New Deal Democrats. A teenager in the 1980s, I could have rebelled, gone with the "cool kids," and become a Reagan Republican. But too many of those kids had bullied me for my physical disability that made walking difficult. This gave me an affinity for the underdog groups, and for the Party that has stood up for them.

And so, given that... Why am I a Yankee Fan? I can't credit most of my family this time: Both of my parents were Met fans while growing up in Newark, New Jersey. My father's parents, both from Newark, were fans of one of the previous New York teams that moved to California after the 1957 season, the now-San Francisco Giants. My mother's mother, from Queens, was a fan of the other New York team that moved away, the now-Los Angeles Dodgers, the team the Yankees are about to play in the World Series for the 12th time.

But my grandfather, who grew up first in Manhattan and then in The Bronx, was a Yankee Fan. He was old enough to walk down the street and watch the original Yankee Stadium being built. He sat in the Bleachers, and watched Babe Ruth, even before Lou Gehrig.

In 1977, my parents wanted to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary without, you know, the kid. And since my father's parents were not an option -- Grandpa was already dead, and Grandma was taking years to die -- they dropped me off with my mother's parents. While I was there, Grandpa watched the Yankee game. He got to me before Grandma did, before she could hook me onto the Mets. Thank God he did!

And how do I reconcile the two? How can I be a Democrat with the most "Republican" of baseball teams?

Actually, it's not that simple. Yes, the Yankees have had, as fans, Republicans such as Mayors Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani. While the Mets have had Democrats such as Governors Hugh Carey and George Pataki; Mayors Robert Wagner, Abe Beame, Ed Koch and Bill de Blasio. (Michael Bloomberg, from Boston, is a Red Sox fan.)

On the other hand, the Yankees have had Democrats such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Governors Mario and Andrew Cuomo; Mayors David Dinkins and Eric Adams; and Senator Chuck Schumer. While the Mets have had Republicans such as Mayor John Lindsay.

It's worth noting that the 2 most corrupt Presidents ever, both Republicans, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, have been known to show up at both teams' ballparks, depending on which one seemed to be better at the time. Front-runners, both of them.

My last live game at the old Yankee Stadium came shortly before the 2008 Republican Convention. In his private box, Giuliani had the Presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who famously won a bet with Giuliani when the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Yankees in the 2001 World Series. When the DiamondVision camera focused on McCain, a war hero who was admired even among people who didn't like Republicans, the near-sellout crowd cheered. When the camera moved over to show Giuliani, who had also run for President that year, but won no Delegates, and was no longer "America's Mayor," he got the hell booed out of him. Both McCain and Giuliani laughed.

Although the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner made a lot of appeals to patriotism, and got busted for illegal campaign contributions to Nixon (the men did reconcile), he also tried to cultivate friendships with the Mayors and the Governors. It worked better with some (Carey, the Cuomos, Dinkins, Giuliani) than others.

So the Yankees don't officially or openly represent either ideology. They know they need to fill the luxury boxes with America's wealthiest, people who can actually afford those insanely priced tickets. But they also know their fan base is working people, in the City, people who ride the Subway to get to the game; and in the suburbs, people who ride New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Commuter Railroad, and various bus lines just to get into the City.

"But," you may ask, "don't the Yankees represent the rich, and the Mets the poor?" Not really: There is plenty of crossover. As New York teams, both tap into both the rich and the poor aspects of the City. How could they not?

The Mets' original owner was Joan Whitney Payson. She was a member of the Whitney family, old-money Republicans. Her brother, John Hay "Jock" Whitney, was a breeder of champion racehorses (horse racing, "the sport of kings"), a polo champion (talk about a rich person's sport), and owned the city's leading pro-Republican newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, before it folded in 1966.

The Paysons and the Whitneys are the kind of old-money people who look down on nouveau riche people like Trump, people who have the same kind of money without the same kind of history or "class," much more than they do on nonrich people -- which helped to fuel Trump's massive jealousy.

Everybody who's not from the New York Tri-State Area seems to hate New York. That's over 300 million people trying to gang up on about 40 million. Despite New York's size, there is an underdog mentality.

It's not the Donald Trumps and the Michael Bloombergs who make New York go. It's the taxi drivers, the bus drivers, the Subway motormen, the tollbooth workers, the pushcart vendors, the waitstaff, the shopkeepers, the repairmen (including auto mechanics), the cops (a.k.a. New York's Finest), the firefighters (New York's Bravest), the garbagemen (New York's Strongest), the Con Edison workers.

The blue collar guys and gals. The people who work. The underdogs. The people who deal with crap similar to the crap you deal with. I get it: It's understandable that some of these people identify with the Mets.

But why should we root for a team that's as bedraggled as we are? We want someone who's gonna lift us up, and let us win along with them, and make us feel like New York really is "the greatest city in the world." The Yankees do that.

The great sportswriter Roger Angell was right: There is more losing than winning in life. He used that to justify rooting for the Mets. But he was also wrong: Why not go with a team that gives you a better chance to end your rotten day with a good result?

To paraphrase Nick Hornby, from his screenplay for the original, British soccer, version of Fever Pitch, You don't get many Bucky Dent or Mookie Wilson moments in real life; and you don't get very many of them in baseball, either. So when they do come, you cherish them. And what team, in any sport, has offered you more to cherish than the New York Yankees?

Given the nature of the New York Tri-State Area, and the nature of New England, it so happens that a solid majority of Met fans, and a solid majority of Boston Red Sox fans, the two teams that Yankee Fans hate the most, also tend to be liberal, and Democratic Voters. I appreciate that. I'd rather talk politics with a Met fan or a Red Sox fan than talk baseball with a Republican.

Happy 100th Birthday, Roger Angell!

 

September 19, 1920, 100 years ago: Roger Angell is born in Manhattan. As has been noted today, he is 5 years older than The New Yorker magazine, and has been contributing to it for most of its history.

His father was Ernest Angell, a lawyer and later the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother was Katharine Sergeant, The New Yorker's 1st fiction editor. When his parents divorced, his mother married one of the top essayists of the era, E.B. White. He graduated from Harvard University, and in World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, the forerunner of the U.S. Air Force.

It was during The War (always, as my grandmother, born in 1924, taught me, Capital T, Capital W) that he first contributed to The New Yorker, in 1944. That was 76 years ago. The magazine published his short fiction and some personal narratives. Eventually, these would be collected and published in book form, including The Stone Arbor and Other Stories in 1960, and A Day in the Life of Roger Angell in 1970.

He was a fan of the New York Giants baseball team. He was there at their home field, the Polo Grounds, at the team's last great height, on September 29, 1954, as Willie Mays made The Catch, to help the Giants win Game 1 of a World Series they would win by a sweep over the Cleveland Indians. He was also there at the team's farewell, their last game at the Polo Grounds, on September 29, 1957, 3 years to the day. The team's move to San Francisco was announced the month before.

"The loss of the New York Giants was absolutely heartbreaking," he told Ken Burns for his 1994 documentary Baseball. And yet, neither he nor anyone else wrote a heartfelt book about the Giants, the way Roger Kahn -- 7 years younger, a newspaperman instead of a magazine man, and Jewish as opposed to the Protestant Angell -- did for the Giants' arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, with The Boys of Summer in 1972.

That oversight, on the part of Angell, George Plimpton, and any other writer worth his salt who had been a Giants fan, caused the Dodgers to "win the historical argument." Although the Giants were far more successful on the field, and had legends like John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, Mel Ott, Carl Hubbell and Willie Mays, and won the most famous game between the teams thanks to the Pennant-winning home run by Bobby Thomson in 1951, it is the Dodgers that people remembered.

So people remembered Jackie Robinson, and not just for his historical achievement. They remembered Roy Campanella and Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges and Don Newcombe. And forgot about pretty much any Giant not named Mays and Thomson. Monte Irvin? Alvin Dark? Whitey Lockman? Don Mueller? Sal Maglie? They became secondary figures behind "the lordly Yankees" and the beloved Dodgers. By the time Noel Hynd published his excellent The Giants of the Polo Grounds in 1988, it was too late.

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In 1962, New Yorker editor William Shawn sent Angell to Florida, to write about Spring Training. It was the first time he'd been professionally asked to write about baseball. He took to it like a duck to water, and may have written better about the sport than anyone ever has.

That same year, the New York Mets debuted as an expansion team, moving into the Polo Grounds until their long-term home, which would be named Shea Stadium, could open for the 1964 season. They were horrible, while the Yankees were defending World Champions and would be again. And yet, the Mets still had decent attendance by the standards of the time. And it was a different kind of fandom. The media called these young Met fans, some of them too young to have gone to Giant or Dodger games on their own, but now old enough to do so, "The New Breed." Angell described them as follows:

Everybody thinks New York only cares about champions, but we cared about the Mets. I remember going to some games in June that year and they were getting walloped, they were getting horribly beaten. But the crowds came out to Polo Grounds in great numbers and people brought horns and blew these horns.

After awhile I realized that this was probably anti-matter to the Yankees who were across the river and had won for so long. Winning is not a whole lot of fun if it goes on. But the Mets were human and that horn I began to realize was blowing for me because there’s more Met than Yankee in all of us. What we experience day to day in our lives, there’s much more losing than winning, which is why we love the Mets.

Speak for yourself, Roger. Life gives us so much garbage, so it helps to have a winning team to give us something to be happy about.

But he wasn't speaking just for himself. Like so many other writers, on baseball and other subjects, he was better when writing about sad things, such as a great ballplayer realizing the end is near, or said player's fans realizing that the man they grew up idolizing would soon no longer be able to play on the same level, or at all.

In 1972, Angell published his 1st book about baseball, The Summer Game. He covered the next 5 seasons, 1972 to 1976, in Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion. The word "companion" was an excellent choice.

It was a time of tremendous transition in the game: Not only were the last of the 1950s stars retiring (which his piece "Three for the Tigers" discusses in regard to 3 guys watching Al Kaline come to the end in 1974, getting to 3,000 career hits but not before his lifetime batting average drops below .300), but the designated hitter came to the American League, and the reserve clause was struck down, replaced by limited free agency.

These books were followed by Late Innings in 1982, and Season Ticket in 1988. In 1991, Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader was published, as the literary equivalent of a greatest hits album. He had resisted the idea of doing an "as told to" biography, but he relented in 2000, following Yankee pitcher David Cone around during what turned out to be his most difficult season. The result, in 2002, was A Pitcher's Story: Innings with David Cone, as perhaps baseball's best writer and one of its smartest players had -- the terminology is ironic -- a hit.

Roger has married 3 times. With his 1st wife, Evelyn, he had daughters named Callie and Alice. Sadly, he outlived all 3. Callie became an expert on art and, perhaps as an extension, the films of Andy Warhol, and a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. But she took her own life in 2010. Alice died of cancer in 2019.

With his 2nd wife, Carol Rogge, had had a son named John Henry. Roger also outlived Carol, who died in 2012. John Henry now lives in Portland, Oregon -- which would be weird if his father lived in Portland, Maine. Actually, his half-sister Alice did, and Roger... lives in nearby Brooklin, Maine (not "Brooklyn"), with his 3rd wife Margaret Moorman, a fellow writer.

In honor of his 100th Birthday, the Mets put a cutout of him in a seat behind home plate at Citi Field, along with the other cutouts serving as stand-ins for fans during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Happy Birthday, Roger. May there be many more seasons to come.

UPDATE: Roger Angell died on May 20, 2022, in New York, of congestive heart failure. He was 101.