Yankees Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Growing up, I was a New York Yankees baseball fan because we had a farm team in Binghamton, NY, a Yankees affiliate, the Triplets. But I knew many people around the country hated the Bronx Bombers because they were too successful. They won the World Series every year from 1936 to 1939, again from 1949 to 1953, and were in the mix most years between 1955 and 1964.

Moreover, they received disproportionate press coverage, even though two other teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, were located within the City limits for most of that period. Mickey Mantle was a bigger star than he would have been in Cleveland. Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe!

I spent much of last weekend watching four football games. As is usually the case, I did not watch them in real-time but recorded them and watched them later. It’s been clear that I’ve been rooting this season for the Detroit Lions and the Buffalo Bills. The Lions lost, alas, but the Bills won.

I’m pulling for the Bills, the only team that plays its home games in New York State. Moreover, I want them to get the monkey off their back as the only team to lose four consecutive Super Bowls (Jan 1991-Jan 1994).

No threepeat!

But I realized only recently that I’m also actively rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs, and I’m not the only one. They’ve won three Super Bowls in five seasons and are going for a threepeat this year. There are many articles about how they were the worst team in the league this season with a winning record. And some complain that the officiating favors Kansas City.

Maybe I’m tired of all the State Farm ads with quarterback Patrick Mahomes and coach Andy Reid or the ubiquitous presence of tight end Travis Kelce and his recently NFL-retired brother Jason.

I have no strong rooting interests between the Washington Commanders and the Philadelphia Eagles. They’re both in the NFC East, where I root for the Giants when they have a decent team. They aren’t the Dallas Cowboys, who I’ve despised for decades.

If the Bills win tomorrow, I’ll continue to support them in the Super Bowl. If the Bills lose, I’ll be cheering for the NFC team.

Don’t bet on it, at least online

But I won’t be wagering on any of it. Zvi Mowshowitz had previously been heavily [and successfully] involved in sports betting.” As he notes, The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed.

“When sports gambling was legalized in America, I was hopeful it too could prove a net positive force, far superior to the previous obnoxious wave of daily fantasy sports.

“It brings me no pleasure to conclude that this was not the case. The results are in. Legalized mobile gambling on sports, let alone casino games, has proven to be a huge mistake. The societal impacts are far worse than I expected.”

He links to others who are likewise loathe to tell others what they cannot do but make the same argument.

“You should need to go to a physical location to place fully legal bets of a non-trivial size, or at least interact with a human or bear some other cost or risk.”

I have been a bit confused by the term Yank or Yankee in that it seemed to have related, but inconsistent, meanings. From Wikipedia: “Within the US it can refer to people originating in the northeastern US, or still more narrowly New England, where the application of the term is largely further restricted to the descendants of colonial English settlers in the region.” The British, before and during the American Revolution, referred to Americans in general as Yankees. And the Americans embraced it, as the song “Yankee Doodle” will attest.

But Southerners, especially around the time of the American Civil War and after, called the Northerners in general Yankees.

In the World War I song, ‘Over There,’ one will find a reference to “The Yanks are coming,” meaning all of the US soldiers. And almost every World War II movie with Allied troops will find a British or Aussie officer referring to “You Yanks,” again including Southerners, some of whom may have balked at the term.

To that end, there was a magazine called Yank, the Army Weekly, which was produced from June 1942 to December 1945 in 21 editions for 17 countries. Appropriately, another definition of the word yank is “to pull with a quick, strong movement; jerk: yanked the emergency cord.”

A slang definition of yank is “to extract or remove abruptly: yanked the starting pitcher early in the game.” And speaking of which, the New York Yankees baseball team is probably the group of Yanks many are familiar with.

Nope, I’m no more clear on the application, or for that matter, derivation of the term.