DOWN IN FRONT: YANKEE (FAN) GO HOME

My friend Greg G, is as loyal a Yankee fan as I know. He also represents everything baseball fans all over the country depise about Yankee fans. He's loud, vulgar, and thoroughly obnoxious. G regularly drives me crazy during the course of the season, bragging about how the Yanks will win it all, and laughing when players on rival teams get hurt. Basically, he violates every superstition I hold dear.

Here is a part of a letter I recieved from him the other day. Truthfully, I didn't have the nerve to print the entire thing. If you are feeling queasy, you may just want to skip this and move along with your day:

Greetings from sunny L.A. I am a diehard Yankee fan, (who as luck would have it) moved to Los Angeles in 1993 only to miss most of my beloved Yankees recent renaissance. I visit the big A (now Edison Field), whenever the Yanks are in town. I even had the good fortune to see Don Mattingly's first and last pinch hit homer to put the Yankees over the top of the Angels in the strike-shortened season of '94. My brother's friend, (also a transplanted New Yorker) went down to the fence behind the batting cage and exhorted Mattingly by shouting at him prior to his at bat, "I came all the way from NY Donnie, we need a big hit!" And Don Mattingly looked at him curiously and amusedly, and then Donnie Baseball delivered to the delight of the more than two-thirds of the crowd who turned Anaheim into the Bronx west for the day. Now I get the YES network and last year I watched no less than 145 games. (Much to the dismay of my good friend Al Belth from the Bronx, who is a stones throw from the stadium, and has cablevision holding him hostage.)

I always take solace when we Yankee fans took over Edison Field, and turn it into our personal NY playground, where we can rebut any of the in-bred Angels fan by asking them to show us their 26 World Series rings. Prior to last season the Angels would show nostalgia clips on the jumbotron of when they won the AL west in the 80's. The best player that they could trot out was our beloved Reggie Jackson (who was past his prime by the time he showed up in La La land). The California Angels changed their name to the Anaheim Angels a few years back. Rightly recognizing that they could not in any way represent the California sports contingent since they were only drawing fans twice the size of the attendance of Expos games.

Now the Angels are the defending champs. I bet we see Angel fans coming out of the woodwork just like the Amazin' Mets after '86, when all of a sudden everyone decided that the Mets were where it was at. The Angels increased their payroll by 20 million to bring back the same nobody's who knocked Goliath on his rump last October. The Angels always played the Yanks hard in Anaheim, mostly because they wanted to quiet all the Bronx brood who turned their sanitized park into a looney bin, and actually sounded like a sporting event was taking place not some boring kennel club dog show.

Now we'll have to hear it from the Anaheim A-holes, who have been waiting since the team's existence to be able to brag to anyone, and especially Yankee fans like me, that Team Disney finally got a ring. If David Eckstein, (who's dwarfed by the bat boy, and has a second job as Tinkerbell at the crappiest place on earth), is holding up another trophy this October, I personally swear that I will eat Mo Vaughn.

Ah, Yankee class. You gotta love it.