“But on the Jewish New Year when Hank Greenberg came to bat and made two home runs off pitcher Rhodes, they cheered like mad for that.”  — Edgar Guest, Detroit Free Press (1934)

(Greenberg received rabbinical permission to play in the World Series on Rosh Hashanah. He famously however, wouldn’t play on Yom Kippur, receiving a standing ovation entering Shul.)

MLB stands for Major League Baseball. It’s as familiar as the NFL and NBA. For me however, it’s Major League B’Omer because the advent of spring augers the imminent arrival of Pesach (starting the Omer) and a new baseball season. (Lag B’Omer signifies we’re a month into the season.)

Which do young Jewish boys look forward to more? I know what my answer was growing up.

Venerating both religions is inculcated early on.

My first recess at my yeshiva grade school, I was surrounded by my new classmates demanding my answer to the critical question: What team do I root for? The Giants, Yankees, or, God forbid, the Dodgers?

Growing up in Washington Heights, in the 50s, you had to choose one.

The Giants played in the Polo Grounds, a few blocks from my apartment. The Yankees were also walking distance, but across the river in the Bronx. The Dodgers required a $.15 subway token to Brooklyn (and a thick skin to return to Manhattan.)

I was a deerhead (Herschkopf means deerhead) in the headlights.

I couldn’t admit that I hadn’t heard of any of them. I assumed there was an objective answer like being a Cohen, Levi, Yisroel, or your blood-type. Surely (as in Hogwarts), I had been assigned to one of them.

I could only think of one way to determine it. I would ask my mother. She had all the answers.

Unfortunately, she, a new immigrant, a self-described greenhorn, didn’t have a clue either. She checked my birth-certificate, hospital-record and school-application, but couldn’t find any of the three teams listed anywhere.

Then, she had an epiphany. In my underwear drawer, she found the Rosetta Stone, a faded, hole-y, outgrown Yankee T-shirt, objective, undeniable proof.

Eureka! I was a Yankee fan!

A famous Life magazine pictorial-essay shows scientist Konrad Lorenz followed obediently by a string of chicks unalterably convinced he’s their mother because he was the first animate being they saw after birth. (He was a Nobel laureate, as well as a Nazi loyalist. Though he later disavowed it, some of his honors were rescinded.)

Allegiances imprinted in that critical impressionable period can never be fully erased.

So it is with me. Like it or not, I am a Yankee chick. For the rest of my life, every night, from April through November, my mood is elevated by news of a Yankee victory, or deflated by a Yankee loss.

To be frank (appropriate to the ballpark), I hate it.

I pride myself on my objectivity. As a psychiatrist, I helped people discipline their emotions, rather than be controlled by them.

Yet, when it comes to the Yankees, I’m helpless. They are hardwired into my psyche. As surely as my eyes atavistically notice a buxom woman entering my field of vision, they automatically scan TV screens for Yankee scores.

It makes no sense. I’ve treated pro athletes. I know their priority is, understandably, their livelihood, not their team. They have no real allegiance to an arbitrarily named menagerie of hired jocks.

They don’t care about the team, or the city. Few Yankees live in New York City off-season, or grew up here. Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Johnny Damon, et al., didn’t hesitate playing for “Red Sox Nation” one season defecting to the “Evil Empire”, the next. Jerry Seinfeld observed rooting for pro teams is cheering for laundry (though he remains a steadfast Mets fan.)

Yankee Stadium is “The house that Ruth built”, but the Babe played for Boston before and after his residency there. If their greatest player could leave the Yankees, why can’t I?

The name Yankee (derived from Jahnke, a Dutch diminutive for John) was originally applied derisively, first by Brits, then by Southerners. Sportswriters only utilized it because the team’s real name, the Highlanders, was too unwieldy. (They originally played in Washington Heights, the highest land in Manhattan.)

The Boston Red Sox were preceded there four decades earlier by the Boston Braves, who subsequently emigrated to Milwaukee, then Atlanta. (Takes a lot of courage to keep moving.) They only acquired the Red Sox moniker when their owner purchased the colorful hosiery after the Braves abandoned them.

Pro team names are either meaningless like the Yankees and Sox (Red or White), or outdated. There are few lakes in Los Angeles, little Jazz in Utah, because the Lakers and Jazz were named for Minneapolis and New Orleans where they originated. The Dodgers were named for Brooklynites dodging trolley cars, not Los Angelenos who never leave their cars.

Rooting for high school teams makes sense. Players are classmates.

Once upon a time, that was true for college teams, as well. Now, college jocks are obscenely paid pros who can play for six different universities during their “career”, rarely attend class in any of them, almost never graduate, and are occasionally illiterate, unable to read the encomia “their” colleges publish about them.

College has become pro football and basketball’s minor leagues, except the athletes aren’t minors, and they’re paid geometrically more than their professors whose classes they never attend.

Over the years, I have personally and professionally known Yankee players, managers, staff and owners. Some, I liked; most, I was indifferent to; a few, I despised. Makes sense to root for the former, but self-abnegating to cheer the latter just because they are, for the moment, wearing pinstripes.

Furthermore, I always root for underdogs. The Yankees are never underdogs, even when their foes are more talented. They are the most successful team in sports history, expected to appear in the Fall Classic annually by divine right.

They are also the most despised team in sports history, as in the hit musical play and film Damn Yankees, or the rock supergroup by the same name. If George Steinbrenner hadn’t owned the Yankees he would not have been as hated (in part because no one would have ever heard of him.)

I will not be buried in a Yankee coffin, or have my ashes spread on the Bronx base-paths, as others have. Yet, even if claimed by dementia, I will always remember bursting into tears with my buddies on that blustery October Shmini Atzeret in 1960, standing in front of an appliance store on Broadway watching Bill Mazeroski hit a home run off Ralph Terry to beat the Yankees in the World Series. I will still bear the abdominal scar from bursting my appendectomy stitches in an ill-advised primal whoop from my hospital bed when Bobby Richardson caught Willie McCovey’s laser line-drive off the same Ralph Terry for the Yankees to win the World Series two years later.

Like the Yankees, or not, I can’t cut that pertinacious umbilical cord. Being a baseball fan is as irreversible as any blood type, as ingrained as any other religion.

My mother threw out that Yankee T-shirt as soon as she found it. She should not have.

It was as holy as it was hole-y. I never really outgrew it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)