You Baby Gorilla.

"Why I Hate the Yankees, or: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Update"

Before I get into the topic of why the Yankees can eat my asshole, a few bits of what qualify as "news" in my little blogging world.

-I started writing for my friend Mark's site, Exploder 98. There are some other contributors, Mark writes a bunch, and it appears to be a decent place to stop on the internet. I "review", in a loose sense of the word, things I do, buy, and drink. At some point I'll start blogging over there too. Lord knows the content is just overflowing here.
-Finally put up all the pictures from the trip Kyle, Greg and I took to Panama. Those are over on my photo blog.
-Comics blog is semi-updated.
-All the back issues of Brickshitter are now permanently hosted thanks to Mark, so I won't have to remember to re-up the YSI links, which I hardly ever remembered to do in the first place.
-Speaking of Brickshitter, Number 6 will be out in a few weeks with the final Hardcore Superbattle, and interview with For Science from New Jersey, and the usual horseshit.

So exciting!

As I was saying, the Yankees blow. Bear with me here.

I grew up playing hockey year round, and being that I don't come from an especially sports-centric family, hockey was the only professional sport I followed at all. As I got older and got more into other sports, I found myself in a weird position where I had to choose a team to root for. It seems most sports fans are fans since birth, or at least since before the age where there's any particular rhyme or reason to allegiances. When you're little you're a fan of a team for usually one of three reasons:
1) Your Dad/older brother/Grandfather/some male relative is a fan. I know its 2007 and all, and everyone saw Rookie of the Year where Henry peels off the label on his glove to find out it's his mom's glove after all, and she's in the stands and is all "thats right honey. Now throw that bullshit underhanded limpwristed floater of a pitch and strike that comically villainous fatass out." So yeah, in theory, that could be the case, but lets be real. Your Dad liked the Jets, you like the Jets. End of story.
2) The team in question is your hometown team. This sometimes ties into reason #1, where your Dad grew up somewhere and moved by the time you came around, but he's still pulling for his old team. This is especially the case when he moves from somewhere sweet, like New York or Cleveland, to somewhere totally sucky like Florida. So maybe your folks made some poorly advised investments in a Gator Ranch and now you live in Florida, but you still root for the Tribe because to both live in Florida AND be a Marlins fan would make you human garbage. Unless you're this guy, who's an inspiration to us all.
3) Whatever team has won the most recently is your favorite because little kids can't handle liking a suck team, and it's awesome to like the best team even if every other kid in school likes them too. This accounts for 95% of Bulls fans my age not from Chicago.
4) You have some sort of bizarre little kid logic behind it. This often involves colors, mascots, logos...you know, the kind of reasons girls like sports teams.

The only pro team I've followed for more or less my entire life is the Boston Bruins. That choice was a combination of reasons #1 and #4. My babysitter at the time was the son of one of my mom's co-workers. My brother and I both loved having him as a babysitter because he'd play street hockey with us all day and let us do questionably dangerous things like play games that consisted of throwing two by fours at each other, that crappy girl babysitters would never let you do. He also played high school hockey, which to my six year old mind might as well have been the NHL. So he was essentially the coolest dude in the world as far as I was concerned, and while he wasn't a relative, he qualifies for the reason #1. The second part, the #4 part, was that I didn't know a Bruin was a bear, and thought it was some kind of a monster. In fairness the bear patches on the shoulders of the jersey's look at least as much like a monster as they do a bear, at least if you're a little kid.

As I got older and decided I wanted a baseball team to follow, I was in the strange position I mentioned at the beginning of this trainwreck. Almost all my friends in Albany were Yankees fans, and the Yankees were in the middle of winning a thousand world series in a row. I was way too old to be some frontrunning asshole, and the Yankees of the last fifteen years have been such a bunch of stuffed shirt clean cut douchebags that I couldn't get behind them even if they hadn't won in years.

So I became a Mets fan. And I'm obviously not going to pretend like I've suffered through ups and downs with them, because since I've followed the Mets they've been either really good or at least pretty alright to decent.

So here's where the title comes in. This year, for the first time in my brief life as a Mets fan, not only were the Mets pretty awesome, but the Yankees were sucking not one but many cocks. I made a half dozen or so $20 bets with friends of mine that the Mets would finish with a better regular season record than the Yankees, and I was so confident that I would have made a dozen more. Every commentator and sportswriter were declaring the Yankees dead in the water, so bad they wouldn't even make the wild card. The mets were riding high, close to a double digit lead atop the NL East. Everything was SO RIGHT.

But then, the Yankees decided to be the Yankees, and the Mets decided to be the Mets. Now the Yankees have the AL Wild Card on lock and are only a game and a half behind the Sox. The Mets however, are teetering on the brink of not only losing the NL East title, but missing the playoffs all together. And I'm going to have to listen to smug fucking Kyle and his stupid fucking Yankees as they probably win the World series, and the Mets will somehow get raped by a gang of wild dogs when they have to make an emergency landing in the desert. It's not the fact that the Yankees are playing near flawless baseball that bothers me. It's not even that the Mets are huffing hard. It's that both things are happening at the SAME TIME in what was supposed to be the Mets year. If you got served a shit sandwich for lunch every day for weeks on end, it would suck but you'd get used to it. But to one morning come in and see the lunchlady preparing a four course gourmet feast, with a big banner that said "JUST FOR YOU!" over it, and to think about it all morning, and get all excited...and then to get not only a shit sandwich but a COLD shit sandwich...man, that blows. And that's what's happening to Mets fans this year.