Opinion: Why this Angeleno is rooting for the New York Yankees
Let me say it plain: I am an Angeleno. I moved to Los Angeles from Manhattan more than 30 years ago. It’s been decades since I considered myself a New Yorker. But when the World Series gets underway Friday, I won’t be rooting for the Dodgers.
There are a number of reasons for my loyalty to the Yankees, and they all start with my dad.
In 1968, when I was 7, he took me to my first game at the old Yankee Stadium. “We” lost, 4-3, to the Red Sox, but I saw Mickey Mantle hit his last Major League home run. Forty years later, my dad and I sat together in the upper deck of that same stadium during one of the final home games before it was razed.
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The first World Series game I attended was also with him: Yankees-Dodgers (sound familiar?), Game 1 of the 1981 Fall Classic. That was the last time (of 11) that the teams faced each other for the championship, until this year. Pearl Bailey sang the national anthem and James Cagney threw out the first pitch.
My father, now 88, grew up a Yankees fan in Brooklyn Dodgers territory during the 1940s. That iconoclastic nature is one of the traits I treasure most about him, and I am glad he passed it on to me. Perhaps this is another reason for my lingering devotion to the Yankees despite becoming an Angeleno. Whatever else, I go my own way.
Equally important, my father taught me to be accountable, and now I am accountable for him. My mother died in mid-September, just three months after she and he moved into assisted living in Southern California from their Manhattan home.
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On many days, I sit with him and keep him company. I accompany him to medical appointments and order books for him to read. I make sure his bills are paid. The shift in agency is a fraught dynamic. That it is inevitable makes it no easier to accept.
Between us, though, the Yankees are different. We share the affinity, a heritage, or maybe it’s an attitude.
Once upon a time, I was a rabid fan, much more so than my father. (He has always been more distanced and reserved.) Now we keep a loose eye on the Yankees together. In 2023, I went to one regular-season game. This year, I attended none. But I am grateful to the team in a way I never could have imagined back when I considered their success a birthright, when I used to rant and rave and yell at the TV, watching from my Los Angeles living room.
Since the playoffs began this month, the Yankees have filled an altogether different sort of function, helping to hold my dad and me together, strengthening a connection that, on all sorts of levels besides baseball, points us forward rather than bearing us back ceaselessly into the past.
This, too, is a challenge of caring for an elder: to keep them in the present, to keep them engaged. It’s become more difficult since my mother’s death, and I don’t expect that to abate just because my father and I watch a few innings of baseball. Still, the World Series offers if not a reprieve, at least something to anticipate. It helps keep his head in the game.
So batter up. My dad and I are pulling for the Yankees. Given who we are and where we come from, how could it be otherwise?
David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion.
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