Should You Root for the New York Yankees?

As you may know, the Twins will not make the playoffs this year. As you may also know, Puckett’s Pond has been reviewing each of the eight teams that WILL make the playoffs, making the case for and against each one so you can decide if you want to root for one of them. Because it’s a lot more fun to watch postseason baseball when you have a team to cheer for. If you haven’t already, please check out our articles on Arizona, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Milwaukee.

Next up: the New York Yankees. Andrew Corselli is the Senior Staff Writer for Yanks Go Yard, and he was nice enough to provide an argument in favor of his team.

The reasons Twins fans should root for the Yankees are really quite simple:

1) You can’t root for someone in your own division. That ixnays the Tigers.

2) As far as the Wild Card goes you can’t root for the Red Sox, they’re the New Yankees™. Do you really want to root for the Rays? Really? REALLY?

3) The Rangers might be fun to root for, but they were just in the World Series last year. Too bad, they had their chance. WE WANT PARITY!

4) If the Angels make it deep in the playoffs we’ll all be subjected to way too much Mike Scioscia face. Do you want that on your conscience? I didn’t think so.

5) Don’t root for the Phillies, just don’t.

6) Eh, the Braves wouldn’t be a bad choice but you can’t root for a team whose longest-tenured player cheated on his high school sweetheart/wife with a Hooters waitress.

7) The Cardinals are in the NL version of your division, you can’t root for a team like that. That kills the Brew Crew as well.

8) The D’Bags? They don’t even have loyal fans, why should they get front runners? Also, see the second half of reason number two.

With all that being said, there remains only one team: the Yankees. Sure they’ve won 27 championships, have the highest payroll in baseball, are perennial contenders and are despised by every fan of every other team, but so what? Rooting for the Yanks doesn’t (necessarily) make you a bad person. Plus, with the Twins already out of it you know the Yanks won’t sweep them out of the postseason yet again. So make like Chuck Knoblauch and come over to the dark side.

Puckett’s Pond’s Notes:

Andrew made a pretty good case, and his sense of humor helped. He made the most of a difficult task. Persuading Twins fans to root for the Yankees is probably about as difficult as persuading a Yankee fan to root for the Twins – it’s definitely a tough sell. But he made good use of a tactic that would make any politician proud: pointing out the flaws in all the other candidates (I hadn’t heard the one about Chipper Jones, but it turned out to be true). And it’s true, all of these teams are flawed, and there are legitimate reasons not to root for any of them.

If you follow the Yankees this postseason, you’ll be rooting for the team of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio. Even if you don’t like them, you have to respect the history of this organization. The game of baseball as we know it might not even exist without the contributions of Ruth, who helped pull the game out of its darkest hour and introduced the idea of prolific power hitting. And DiMaggio is the only baseball player mentioned in a Simon and Garfunkel song (as far as I am aware).

Of course, there are those of us who are still less than happy about the 2003, 2004, 2009, and 2010 ALDS. I don’t think any amount of campaigning (negative or otherwise) will persuade those folks to root for the Yankees. Then again, given how terrible the Twins are this year, all those times they got knocked out of the playoffs by the Yankees are almost becoming positive memories…

Anyway, if you’re not convinced yet, don’t worry. We still have a couple more teams to profile. Next time, we’ll talk about the Philadelphia Phillies.