Voice of a fan: "This year my eager anticipation of Opening Day has changed..."

From great IT IS HIGH commentator DickAllen:

I woke up in this morning with the realization that I have many more yesterdays than I have tomorrows. I don’t feel any particular sadness over this fact, but as I approach my seventieth birthday – a staggering fact in so many ways I have yet to fully digest – I got to thinking once again about baseball (and the Yankees), something that has occupied a great deal of my idle time for the past sixty years.

I became conscious of baseball six years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn and as the sun rises on yet another season, I find myself waking up to a kaleidoscope of images that form a greatest hits of my past. You might say I’ve always been a sucker for a man in uniform, especially if the uniform has pinstripes.

Being a faithful reader of the New York Post sports pages, local heroes took center stage in a very permanent way prior my own exodus to California fourteen years ago. From Phil Linz and his harmonica to Mel Stottlemyer, who carried himself with the same quiet dignity that I imagine Lou Gehrig did, to the brawling Reggie, Thurman and Billy edition all the way up to the Core Four dynasty, I have vivid memories of all those teams that had me impatiently waiting through January as the days seemed to move more slowly in the snow. April always seemed too far away. Probably, like many of you, I would count the days.

But this year my eager anticipation of Opening Day has changed. In past years, Opening Day had a special kind of aura about it; the day was very nearly sacred ritual. It meant a day off work for me, and in the absence of my home ballpark, an afternoon at a local pub I knew would be filled with Yankees fans all wearing their gear would be almost as good. It was a celebration unlike any other, win or lose.

It was said years ago that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM. It was a smartass comment that stuck, and years later The Intern would happily crow about adopting the idea of the Yankees being the “Evil Empire”, as derisive a term as you can apply to a baseball team, to a group of boys playing a boys game. No one ever gleefully welcomed the idea that the Yankees were a corporate entity but somehow that Death Star moniker was met with a kind of mindless arrogance that has characterized this current Yankees regime, with leadership that touts itself as a “championship-caliber”, but has been characterized these past fifteen years by a complete inability to judge and nurture real talent, and an overconfidence in its limited abilities.

So I’m sitting here this morning with a bland eagerness very like a love that has lost the excitement of years past owing to an endless parade of failures as the Yankees have tried to prop up who they are with who they used to be. What has become clear to me that The Intern, a man whose very presence sickens me, whose name I cannot even utter, is in fact, the owner, the guy pulling the strings and making all the decisions without any real input from any of his alleged advisors. So, in the end, I’m rooting for a team – no – a corporation. I’m rooting for a corporation run by a man who is an owner in name only and I’m convinced that neither he nor his general manager know anything about baseball and has very little dignity befitting a Yankee. You only need to remember the way he treated Joe Torre and Derek Jeter to understand that the man has no moral fortitude.

As my years dwindle toward an inevitable end, it is not the lack of championships that bothers me. What I am most despondent about is the total lack of direction – baseball direction. The Yankees management has been successful in its ability to make money. The Corporation’s value has risen dramatically in spite of its lack of success, like a stock whose share price is inflated beyond its underlying value. The Yankees aren’t in the business of winning baseball, they're just in business. It may be business to them, but it's personal to me. I can’t look at this love of my life the same way anymore and I’m too old for a divorce.