A Reason for Yankee Fans to Care about the Playoffs

Let’s put the upcoming ALCS in the perspective of a typical Yankee fan.

On the one hand, you have Tampa Bay Rays, the former Yankee battering ram that decided the best way to assimilate to Major League Baseball was to play like an expansion team for the first 11 years of its existence.

Usually playing the role of guppy to a hungry pinstriped shark trying to gobble up wins, the Rays have been more pavement than road block for the Yanks in their franchise’s history. Now they are on the cusp of the World Series.

On the other hand, there are the evil and dreaded Boston Red Sox. Since 2004, the Sox have gone from being the butt of Yankee fan’s jokes to supreme annoyance. A team that couldn’t win one championship in 86 years is now looking for its third in five years.

So where does a Yankee fan turn? To Los Angeles of course.

It’s almost impossible to root for a winner in the ALCS because inevitably it would become a catch-22.

Root for the Rays and accept the facts that the Yankees now fit in third in the AL East totem pole. Cheer for the Red Sox and you might as well hand in your membership in the Evil Empire. Let alone risk the chance of a bleacher creature beating you up if you’re within two mile radius of Yankee Stadium (new or old).

But out on the West coast rests a team that can be the answer to all those problems.

The Dodgers are the new bandwagon team. They were a team that looked like it would spend October lamenting over the fact that its strong pitching staff would once again be made irrelevant by its anemic offense.

Then at 3:59 p.m. on July 31, Manny Ramirez changed everything.

Since the trading deadline, "Manny being Manny" has taken the Dodgers to a new level. An NL West championship level, an NLCS level, maybe even a World Series level.

But it has also changed the complexion of the playoffs for those Yankee fans not too apathetic to care. It has given them a team to root for.

Rooting for the Dodgers means rooting for Joe Torre. Torre, who was systematically kicked out of the Bronx last winter and figuratively spit on by the new Yankee owners, is the manager of the Dodgers.

He has done just as masterful a job in leading the team to this stage of the playoffs as he had in almost any of the years with the Yankees.

Torre has had to deal with an injury to the team’s best player, pre-Manny era, Rafael Furcal, that left him out of the lineup for the majority of the year. He has had to overcome the loss of his stud closer, Takashi Saito, and dealt with the bullpen in a competent manner that belied his troubles doing the same in New York in his last few years.

Most importantly, the way Torre dealt with Hurricane Manny proved once again that while he may not be the game’s best manager, he is the best psychologist.

Torre managed to incorporate Ramirez into a clubhouse that fell apart last year after a lack of chemistry and in-house mumbling and grumbling. One that was already divided due to a schism between the team’s aging superstars and the youth movement on which the Dodgers had become predicated on.

And if that is not enough to make Yankee fans root for the Dodgers, then there is one final factor—the Manny factor.

Almost unequivocally, there is no more appealing story line than seeing the Red Sox make it back to the World Series, trying to prove that it won its first two titles despite Ramirez and not because of him. But the only force in between them and the ring was Ramirez himself.

Talk about irony.

Ask Yankee fans to raise their hands if they would find it sweet to see Boston fall short because of the revenge of Manny, and they would raise both hands at once. Feet too, if they counted in the voting.

So sure, this October maybe a little more boring than usual for Yankee fans. But if they need to find a way to follow the playoffs, they know exactly where to look.

In the words of Horace Greeley, “Look west Yankee fan.”

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