Me and the Yankees.

I hate the New York Yankees.

I don't hate Andy Pettitte or Jorge Posada or Mike Mussina or Chien-Ming Wang or Johnny Damon or Jason Giambi.

I sorta like Derek Jeter and Scott Proctor and Bobby Abreu. Mariano Rivera and Hideki Matsui, too. And Robinson Cano.

OK – admittedly, I'm not an Alex Rodriguez fan.

Don't really have a strong feeling one way or the other on Melky Cabrera or Kyle Farnsworth, or on Doug Mientkiewicz. Brian Bruney and Sean Henn and Luis Vizcaino and Mike Myers? Take 'em or leave 'em.

I don't mind Yankees fans. In fact, there are plenty of them that I admire.

Love their uniforms, the simplicity of their ballpark, and Bob Sheppard.

I like Joe Torre, and Don Mattingly. Ron Guidry's 1978 Topps card was one of my favorites, and so he's good in my book.

But if you want a short list of the things I hate, you can limit the size of it to any number greater than zero, and the New York Yankees are on it.

I hate the fact that they have eleven players making more than $10 million dollars this year.

No, wait. Make that twelve. Forgot momentarily about Roger Clemens. (Who I still sorta like.)

I hate the deference their hitters and pitchers get on balls and strikes.

I hate the ESPN mentality that that every other team, with the exception of Boston, is sentenced to playing the role of the Washington Generals. That baseball needs the Yankees to be great.

No, it doesn't.

Of course, I hate that my team seems to behind the eight ball the minute the lineup cards are exchanged with that team.

But that hatred is merely on the level of my distaste for peanut butter, jogging, reality TV, and the decision to let Steve Nash go. It's nowhere near the hatred I have for the Evil Empire (not the players, but the team), whose authorized tilt of the playing field makes it so easy to crave for them to fail miserably, by which I mean to fall short of reaching the World Series. Because it's plainly inexcusable for a roster like that not to be one of the last two standing, every single year.

Second to the elation I'll feel when Texas next makes the playoffs will be the next time that New York doesn't.


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