Don't Blame the Stadium -- Yankee FANS are Quiet

I don’t take any issue with Terry Francona or Dan Shulman – who form a terrific team, by the way. (Oh, and you should catch a college basketball game with Shulman on the call, too. The guy’s just solid.) The ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast team surmised this week that the weak crowd noise in the new Yankee Stadium – and it is undeniably weak – is a product of the Stadium’s design and high ticket prices. I don’t disagree, but I think there is something else that has contributed even more. Frankly, I think the old Yankee Stadium would be almost as quiet were it still standing and housing Bombers games. The fans have changed. Specifically, winning has spoiled them. I must first admit: I am going to take this completely from a self-centered viewpoint, but I don’t care. I think I’ve been a pretty damned good Yankee fan for 35 years. And my generation of Yankee fans and I had a lot to do with making the old Stadium what it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s a good viewpoint. Read it. I’m 39 years old. That means I was 22 and a senior in college in the fall of 1995, when the Yankees made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. I repeat: the Yankees made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years. Do you know what it’s like to go 14 years without seeing your team play a single post-season game? If you are an Orioles, Royals, Indians, Rangers, Astros or Pirates fan (or if you were an Expos fan), you do. If you came of age in the era of divisional play and cheered for any other team, you don’t. And either way, you certainly don’t know what it’s like to have that kind of drought while watching another team in the same city win a championship and take the town over. That’s what it was to be a Yankee fan in the 1980s – to see the Mets not only win two division titles and a World Championship, but also to see them draw 3 million fans and make New York truly a Mets town. Don’t believe me? The Mets won the World Series in 1986 for the first time in 17 years. They drew 3 million fans the next year. The Yankees won it in 1996 for the first time in 18 years. They drew less than 2.6 million the next year – in a bigger ballpark! They failed to draw 3 million in 1998, when they won 114 regular-season games. Over the six years from 1985, when the Mets started to content, to 1990, the Mets ranked second, second, second, first, third and second in the National League in attendance. I won’t even get into where the Yankees fell over those same six seasons, but over a similar stretch, from 1995 through 2000, the Yankees ranked seventh, seventh, fifth, third, third and third in the American League. Believe me now that New York was a Mets town? You put all that together, and you can believe me when I tell you that by 1995, those of us who had not seen the Yankees in the playoffs since we were little kids, had worked ourselves into a pretty serious frenzy, and when we went to the Stadium, we were going to shout ourselves hoarse to give the Yankees every last bit of home-field advantage. That place was rowdy and loud and happy and awesome. By 1999, when the Yankees won for the third time in four years, I guess it’s fair to say our thirst for victory had been somewhat slaked. The insane-asylum atmosphere in the Bronx could have dissipated. But then along came the Subway Series in 2000, and 9/11 in 2001, and the rise of the new and improved Red Sox in 2003. Each year, there was some new incentive to make it seem like life and death all over again. That’s not the case now. It’s hard to put a finger on when it stopped being that way. I think it was probably 2004, both with the arrival of Alex Rodriguez and the stunning loss to Boston in the 2004 ALCS. Each of those events changed the dynamic, at least for me. In 1996, the Yankees were a scrappy band of overachievers, a group so charming and likeable that the rival Mets took out a full-page ad in the New York Times after the Yankees won the World Series, congratulating the Yankees and thanking them for “making our city proud.” They ceased to be that sometime before 2004, but you could almost talk yourself into it. Not anymore, once Rodriguez showed up. At that point, the Yankees were undeniably the team that was going to win by outspending you. And they were worse than that, because they didn’t win. The loss in the ALCS, however, meant that the stakes we always knew no longer existed. It’s sad to say, and nobody in New York OR Boston wants to hear this, but the stakes were always different. The Yankees had to win every year. The Red Sox, like the Brooklyn Dodgers 50 years earlier, just had to win once. The 2007 title for Boston and the 2009 Yankees championship were great moments for each city, but they exist in a vacuum. For the Yankee fan, the collective years of having the upper-hand, right through 2003, were sweet because we had to win every time, and we did. That ended in 2004. And even if that’s not how you feel about it, there is this: If you are my age, you are not screaming your lungs out at Yankee Stadium the way you did when you were 22, because if you kept that up, you’d have no voice left. And anyway, what’s the point? You don’t have the fear of not winning this year because you don’t know what the future holds. You know exactly what the future holds. More Yankee teams that should at least make the playoffs. And if you’re 22 now, you are in prime stadium-screaming age. But you will never know what it is to want so desperately just to see your team win once, the way we did in 1995, the way fans of every other team do now. You can’t know, because the Yankees have been in the playoffs every single year but one since you were 5 years old, and they’ve won five World Championships. You are spoiled. You’re not as loud as we were. Why would you be?