Indoctrinated from Youth for the Yankees

I was brainwashed to be a New York Yankees fan. Early. It started with my father's hobby of collecting baseball cards from the backs of Post cereal boxes in the early 1960s (I may need to remind my loyal readers that I'm 54). I remember that glorious Roger Maris card I got as I mimicked my dad (probably with his encouragement). He had that Lipton's Tea box that he stored his vast collection in, and I had my trickle assortment of cards that I treasured. My dad also bought me a New York Yankees cap that I treasured for decades (of course, it only fit me when I was little). One day back then, my father suddenly announced that he and I were going to a New York Yankees spring training game in their exhibition base city of Fort Lauderdale (they also had a Class AA Florida State League team representing Ft. Laud.). I don't personally remember the experience very much ( I didn't understand the rules of baseball hardly at all back then), but for years afterward he complained that all I had wanted to do was to look at my cards, which I (according to his account) had forgotten to bring. I don't remember his account, the veracity of which I suspect to this day.

That having been said, I have always regarded the New York Yankees' sudden drop from baseball prominence in the mid-sixties as one of the great calamities of the twentieth century. By the time of their resurrection in the seventies under owner George Streinbrenner, occasional manager Billy Martin, and a new cast of players, I had lost touch with them and tended to support other teams. But during the late nineties, when good ol' Joe Torre was their manager, I returned to the fold and have tended to root for them ever since.

So when I actually visited the Big Apple for the first time ever this past April and spent my first restaurant experience there watching them open their season against the Red Sox, it didn't represent the first time I rooted for them. Nor did it last night when they swept the Minnesota Twins with a convincing 6-1 home victory. I had already been indoctrinated!