Yankees Fans, Losing With a Vengeance

"Yeah. It wasn't like they were trying to kill me. You know, it was probably some guys five rows back, 'Hey, get the guy in the hat.' You know. All in good fun."

Richards, 29, just likes watching baseball, and a Mets game will do if the Yankees aren't in town. Getting a rise out of the haters, he says, is just a bonus.

"The thing is that I wear my hat everywhere I go, so just because I'm going to Shea doesn't mean I'm going to take it off."

It will take more than a .511 record to silence these people.

"I'm generalizing here, but I think that Yankees fans are more combative and a few decibels louder than the typical Mets fan," says Jeremy Schaap, who has been covering baseball for ESPN since 1992. "The Yankees fan is less likely to be going to the game for a family outing and more likely to be pounding his chest and proclaiming the greatness of the franchise.

"Shea is like a picnic area. Yankees Stadium is like the Roman Colosseum."

Of course, Yankee-philes, even at their most grating, are lambs by the standards set by international soccer hooligans. In Turkey, the truly ardent have been known to locate the visiting team's hotel and camp out, chanting slogans like "Welcome to Hell!" to keep the players awake all night. At halftime of a match, a phalanx of machine-gun-toting cops decked out in SWAT-like uniforms takes over the field so nobody gets any ideas.

There is rarely a paramilitary presence at either Shea or Yankees Stadium. Baseball in New York is less about mayhem than boozy tribalism.

"Every time I've gone to a game in the last couple years, the beer drinking has been murder," says author and raconteur Jimmy Breslin. "Late innings, they're all over the joint! I'm not complaining. I'm a fan of bad behavior. But it's not even bad behavior. It's just stupid."

The current stretch of poor play is hardly the first the Yankees have endured. But the team won four titles in five years starting in 1996. That run, plus all the history, has conditioned the faithful for domination.

"Yankees fans have a sense of entitlement," said Ray Robinson, author of "Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time," who is 87 years old and has been attending Yanks games since the late '20s. "It's not that they're much different than other fans. It's just that they're connected to the high-and-mighty Yankees, and out-of-towners resent the team."

For connoisseurs of Yankees anguish, now would be a pretty good time to head to Yankee Stadium. Get there on time, because by the seventh inning, there's a good chance the disheartened masses will be heading home, as they were a couple Saturdays ago. The team was getting pounded by the Oakland Athletics, 7-0. The Yankees had just one hit. In the eighth inning, something like a ripple of excitement swept the stands when two Yankees in a row walked.

Amid the briefly hopeful cheers, Jacob Beckman, 18, and his friend, Isaac Goldberg, 19, discussed their pain and disbelief.

"It still feels like they are going to make the playoffs," Goldberg said, a score pad in one hand, sitting 20 rows behind home plate. "I've been following the team since 1995, and they haven't missed the playoffs in all those years. So, it's hard to imagine."

As he spoke, the inning ended with Johnny Damon at the plate and two men stranded on base. People moaned. There were boos. The stream of fans heading to the exits doubled. It would later be reported that Yankees relief pitcher Scott Proctor was so annoyed by his performance that he set some of his own gear on fire, causing a small blaze in the dugout. A baffling act of immolation -- somehow, that summed up the season.

Beckman reminisced about the time he went to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, for a Dave Matthews concert. Between songs, a chorus of "Yankees suck" broke out.

"Between songs!" Beckman said. "I mean, there wasn't any baseball in sight. We were at a concert!"

At moments like that, the customary retort of choice among Yankees fans -- to the charge of arrogance or excessive pride or whatever they were accused of -- was "Yeah, but we win." With that argument gone, Beckman isn't sure what he has left.

"It feels like there's nothing to fight back with," he said. Then he and Goldberg gathered up their belongings and left, as Queen's "We Will Rock You" blasted, unironically, from every loudspeaker in the stadium.