October 2025

Memoir of a Yankee Fan of a Certain Age

by Howard Wach

I turned 70 last February, a scary number that pushed me deeper into the practice of looking backward in decade-long chunks, a survey of love, joy, fear — the works. The New York Yankees occupy 60-plus years’ worth of that retrospective space, and their fortunes, I have discovered, uncannily aligned with my own.

Every baseball fan knows the quasi-religious drill. The annual worship cycle begins in February and ends in late October if things go well; or sometime in August if not. We attend nine-inning revival meetings and tie our emotions to a stubborn communal faith. We indulge in a respite from the real world and feel a superstitious jolt when tuning in the game causes our team to collapse. It’s powerful stuff.

To extend the religious metaphor, these are the revealed truths I’ve found behind the memory door. Yankee destinies matched my first act: a happy childhood, miserable adolescence, and rocky passage to adulthood. Further down the road, midway through the second act, my team and I shared a perfectly timed renewal. A homecoming, a redemption that sweetened my passage through the middle-aged householder years.

First let’s set the context. After winning 14 pennants and nine World Series titles in 16 years, the Yankees wandered through the American League wilderness from 1965 to 1976. That 11-year blip of mediocrity ended 49 years ago, footnote to a century of winning and stretches of utter dominance. I hear the objections already. Eleven years? Nothing. A nanosecond in so many baseball chronologies of dashed hopes and broken dreams. Met fans will reflexively flip me the bird. Even after their 21^st century resurrections, Wrigley Bleacher Bums and Red Sox Nation will snicker and jeer. Fair enough. I know everybody hates the Yankees. They hated the Boss (so did I, sometimes), they hated Reggie, they hated A-Rod, they hate entitlement, arrogance, and the money, money, money. I get all that. Still, it’s been 16 years since the last Yankee championship in 2009, a full generation since Joe Torre’s team ruled the baseball universe. The 2024 World Series debacle will live in infamy (or schadenfreude) for a long time. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Damn Yankees
One freezing February morning in 1955, I entered this world in Dr. Morris Leff’s Central Maternity Hospital, a minor Bronx institution on the Grand Concourse a mile or so north of Yankee Stadium. I was screaming, I’m told. Maybe unhappy I’d have to wait for baseball season to begin. Three months later “Damn Yankees” opened on Broadway, a perfect cultural signifier just when the old mob comedian Joe E. Lewis supposedly said, “Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel.”

My father Danny and his brother Morty grew up nearby, weaned on prewar Yankee supremacy: Lou Gehrig’s screaming line drives crashing into the bleachers, Joe D.’s elegant all-around excellence, eighth-inning explosions — the legendary “five-o’clock lightning” — that doomed visiting teams. As a kid I soaked up my dad and uncle’s old Bronx tales.

Two team pictures of Yankee championship squads — 1951 and 1961 — hang above my desk. The players wear clean home uniforms; arms folded in the classic team-photo pose. Centered above them I’ve placed a photo portrait of a maskless, crouching Yogi, cap turned backward, shin guards and chest protector in place, a ball tucked into the round catcher’s mitt on his raised left hand, his sharp-eyed mug slightly squinting. I pulled the team pictures from a “wall of fame” in our parents’ Florida garage when my brother and I cleaned out their apartment. Danny got them from Morty, who always carried a glove and bat in the trunk of his car and once played with Whitey and Mickey in a fantasy camp. My son Ben, whose greatest childhood pleasure may have been receiving a Derek Jeter jersey for his eighth birthday, found the Yogi picture for one of my birthdays. Yankee fealty runs broad and deep in my line.

Hitting .350
Danny and Grandpa Charlie took me to my first game in 1962. I sat between them behind home plate, the protective netting above us. Charlie made me laugh, as he often did, when he brought his hands up to pretend-catch foul balls. I looked around in awe at the scale of things. Three huge tiers of banked wooden seats, supported by steel and concrete pillars, stretched past the baselines and curved into the gigantic outfield. High above us, flags billowed over the famous scalloped rooftop frieze. A tobacco-smoke haze swirled through the stands. Action on the field raised the constant thrum of voices to a low roar, and white-shirted fans filled the bleachers beyond impossibly distant outfield walls. The massive stadium filled my little boy’s senses. Tucked between my father and grandfather, I grasped the enormity of it yet felt completely safe.

Even then I knew all the names, learned as I watched Danny watch televised games. The next winter the Yanks traded away Bill “Moose” Skowron, their hard-hitting first baseman. The trade puzzled me. I felt betrayed, as if something rightfully mine had been snatched away. “Why, Daddy?” I asked. “Don’t worry, Howie,” he replied, “the Yanks know what they’re doing.” That satisfied me, since Dad knew everything. My allegiances were firming up nicely.

I was a really sharp grade-school student too. My eight-year-old brain sponged it all up. School was a breeze. School was fun. I was hitting .350, belting long balls in language and arithmetic all over the classroom. I was so sharp that the school authorities, in their Long Island wisdom, pushed me through second and third grade in one year.

Pretty Mrs. Furst eased my mid-year passage into third grade with plenty of extra attention. One day, she stood behind me and gently cupped my face in her hands. I melted into a puddle of pre-sexual pleasure that evaporated into jealousy when I learned she was pregnant. I didn’t understand the mechanics but grasped that I was not her one and only love. A disappointment, true, but the world still spun on its proper axis since the Yankees were perennial champions. That October the Dodgers dispatched them in four games, a crack in the armor, and a premonition. In 1965 — after one more dynastic pennant and another World Series loss — age and diminished skills sent them plunging to a sixth-place finish. Whitey was 36, Mickey a depleted 33, Maris was hurt most of the year. The axis had shifted. Terrible timing for a kid like me.

Sinking Toward Oblivion
We found another artifact in the Florida garage. A 1966 game program, the lineups penciled on the scorecard in my careful block letters. The little book cost a quarter then and sets you back 10 bucks today. I can buy a 1966 specimen on eBay — good condition, slightly creased — for $39.99.

I’m a historian and this was a bona fide primary source, so I went to work. What do we have here? White Sox vs. Yankees, rosters printed above the scoring box. Ads for manly products rimmed the page: Old Spice, Rise Shave Cream, Cutty Sark Scotch, and Old Gold ciggies. I stopped scoring after the fifth inning. Did I lose interest? Not likely. A little sleuthing via the online Baseball Reference got me to May 28, 1966.  Then I dug out the May 29 New York Times game story. Rain had descended and the game was called after the fifth with the score tied at 2-2.

I parsed the lineups in my primary source: Richardson, Tresh, Boyer, Howard, Pepitone — heroes of the last triumphal flare before the 1965 fall. Maris was injured that day, and Mantle hit third. I surrounded that magical name with short Keith Haring-style emphasis lines. But the shocking collapse of ‘65 was descending into tragedy. They were a barely middling 17-20 on May 28 and finished the season dead last (back when last was last, as in 10^th place), sinking toward oblivion like the figure falling through space in the opening sequence of “Mad Men.” Seventy wins, 89 losses, and that 2-2 tie. The mighty had fallen, good and hard.

I Hate the Mets
In 1966, my 11-year-old soul loved baseball as much as DC Comics and Mad Magazine. Possibly more. Saturday mornings I pedaled my bike to the candy store and blew my 25-cent allowance on five fresh packs of Topps Cards, unless the spinning comic book rack held a new 12-cent Action or Superman. Middle-school confusions and Beth Goldberg’s short shorts hadn’t yet divided my attention, but Freudian latency was slipping away. Angela Donofrio’s big black eyes and wavy hair sent faint tremors through me when our fifth-grade desks faced each other. But what was that smudge on her forehead one late winter Wednesday? Nothing a Jewish kid could suss out. And why did lessons in fractions fail to click through to instant comprehension?

I was a pretty good Little League first baseman, a tall lefty. I loved the feel and smell of my glove and sweet crack of the bat — no vibration, no stinging hands — when you barreled it just right, which I could do on occasion. My biggest problem? Yankee loyalty is in my blood, and I’m an outlier in my Long Island neighborhood among yammering Met fans cheering for their kooky, lovable losers. They captured hearts and minds all around me, ruled New York, and ruined my summers. Outraged by the unfairness of it all, I wrote a peevish letter to Steve Jacobson, a sportswriter for Newsday, the Long Island daily, whining about lopsided coverage that grossly favored the Mets and reduced my team to one wire service paragraph. “When the Yankees are more interesting,” he wrote back, “we’ll pay more attention to them.” That really stung. Then the fucking Mets won everything in ‘69.

 I Love You, Joe
I loved Joe Pepitone. He was my anti-hero role model, like Jack Nicholson’s wayward pianist in Five Easy Pieces. His talent and potential had prompted the Moose Skowron trade. And Danny was right. Sure enough, Pepi helped the Yanks win their last two pennants in ‘63 and ‘64 and led the team with 31 homers in ‘66. I tried to copy his smooth lefty glovework and quick swing and absorbed his seductive bad-boy vibe. The long hair, the swagger, the cool Italian good looks. Food for my blooming rebellious instincts. I didn’t know he played an active late-night game at the Copa and the Peppermint Lounge. I learned all that later, after he pissed away his career and fessed up in a wistful 1975 autobiography called Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud, still available on Amazon.

A television memory flashed past as I pondered that old scorecard. Riding a hot streak, Pepitone bangs a double to right field. Phil Rizzuto’s high tenor, the soundtrack of two Yankee generations, exclaims “Holy Cow!! This is what American League pitchers have been afraid of for years.” But those productive bursts never lasted long. The Yanks gave up on Pepi after ’69 and traded him to Houston for Curt Blefary, a journeyman outfielder who hit .212 in one Bronx season.

Tumbling Down
Yankee baseball crumbled into annual disappointment. So did my baseball dreams when I saw the massive ninth grader who played first base on the middle-school team. Suddenly, everything went south. An advanced math class and its teacher knocked me sideways. He knew I was struggling and did nothing. Red lines slashed across my test papers meant academic failure, a lousy new feeling. New anxieties crept in too: the unnerving sight of boys and girls entwined, like pretty, blonde Diane Callahan wrapped up with big, tough Joey Falciano outside the school gym.

Intimidated and reeling, I fell away from the smart kids and gravitated to losers like crazy, troubled Mitchell Rose, who ran through the halls shouting nonsense and lived in a ramshackle house with his divorced mom. I found him hilarious. Or Steve Rockfeld, who never saw a shortcut he wouldn’t take. A couple of years later his delinquent cousin procured our first “nickel bag” of pot. One fall day in 1970, as we walked home from school, Rockfeld spied a VW Beetle, ignition keys dangling. He jumped in the driver’s side, and I rode shotgun. We cruised around for two days before cops clocked our stolen plates, pulled us over, and slapped handcuffs on us. That did not go well at home.

The Yankees wallowed in futility and decrepitude while I floundered in school and frightened my parents. I bumbled through diagrammed sentences, chemistry, and Spanish grammar while braless girls in tiny miniskirts terrified, inflamed, and ignored me. Picture me ditching school and creeping through the weedy scrub that bordered the six-lane expressway behind our house to smoke cigarettes and wait out the day. Picture a hungover Mantle striking out, flinging away his helmet, and hobbling back to the dugout on ruined legs. Jake Gibbs, Jerry Kenney, and Horace Clarke hit .230 and flubbed easy chances. Poor Horace. Not an awful player, really, but somehow the poster boy, the sad face of those downtrodden teams. Mediocre, like me.

Oh, there were bright spots, or at least mixed reviews. A 10^th grade history teacher introduced ways of thinking I wanted to learn. “How credible was Tacitus?” he asked, and somehow the question penetrated my foggy brain and stayed there. I made the JV basketball squad, a temporary win until a badly sprained ankle killed my fragile confidence and I spiraled off the team. The intrepid Mel Stottlemyre won 20 games three times between ‘65 and ‘69. He lost twenty in ‘66, a perverse sign of quality. In a late season 1969 cameo, young Thurman Munson injected a pugnacious spark of talent and toughness. “The Yankees got a catcher who’s gonna be great,” my friend Jeff’s dad predicted while driving us home from a Saturday bowling session one September day. And Ron Blomberg, the “Designated Hebrew”, brought hope and joy to bar mitzvah boys and punished right-handed pitchers but flailed hopelessly against lefties and had a giant hole in his glove.

Up in the Grandstand
Attendance on May 28, 1966 was 14,622. Unthinkably meager now, but about average during the lean years. By ‘70 and ‘71 a trip to the Stadium with friends meant a day-long escape from suburban tedium. We’d smoke a joint, take the LIRR to Woodside, and change for the long subway ride into Manhattan and up to the Bronx. Sometimes we stopped at a corner grocery and used our fake IDs to score a six-pack. In those innocent days you could breeze past the grizzled ticket takers and carry your package into the ballpark. We’d climb the ramps to our $1.50 grandstand seats, inhale the aroma of stale beer and cigar smoke baked into the walls, and settle in wherever we wanted.

I relished my time in the old grandstand, happy to commune with fellow believers for a little while and remember (or imagine) the glory days. You heard strong opinions up there. Beefy, raspy-voiced guys sat alone sipping beer, scattering peanut shells, and bellowing across rows of vacant seats about Mantle or why Munson would never be as good as Berra. Eyes remained fixed on the action; they never looked at each other. “Can o’ corn,” one of them would sneer as a harmless fly ball rose to the height of our seats before falling into a waiting outfielder’s glove to kill a Yankee rally.

It was oddly placid in that cavernous stadium. Bob Sheppard’s elegant tones dignified each player’s name and echoed across the vast spaces; the stadium organist played the “Star Spangled Banner” and bouncy, show-tune interludes between innings. No sensory assault kept the crowd entertained — or distracted — every minute. No pounding techno-rock blitzed your brain; no roving cameras projected delirious fans on a giant centerfield screen; no flashing lights constantly urged you to “MAKE SOME NOISE.” The third baseman who booted a grounder heard the epithet you screamed at him. Or you could have a conversation.

Free at Last
I felt free and unburdened when I walked across the Westbury Music Fair stage to collect my high school exit ticket in June of ‘72. It’s about fucking time, I thought to myself. I won’t miss any of these people. I had no close friends, no prom to remember, no clubs or activities or “school spirit” (a phrase that made no sense to me). I skipped the yearbook. I didn’t want to memorialize any of it or any of them.

That fall I found myself in Boston, of all places, attending a college which kindly accepted my mixed bag of grades. I liked exploring that old, faded city, but I was aimless and flailing, not remotely ready to manage myself. I played a lot of pinball, drank lots of beer, and hid my insecurities in a haze of pungent smoke. I arrived with two ounces, needless insurance against running dry. I didn’t anticipate moving into a dormitory saturated with pot, hash, quaaludes and acid, heartily enjoyed by just about everyone.

It never occurred to me to visit Fenway Park, since sex, drugs, and rock and roll now mattered far more than a team going nowhere. Besides, “the rivalry” didn’t truly ignite until one hot August day in ‘73. Stubby, grimy Munson and tall, chiseled Carlton Fisk (a genuine New Hampshire Yankee) squared off and pummeled each other after Stick Michael whiffed on a suicide squeeze bunt attempt as Munson rumbled home from third base. He body-slammed Pudge, they went at it, the benches emptied, and a 40-year feud was born. The Yanks started well that season — the first in the Steinbrenner era — but finished a dreary 80-82, disintegrating after that catchers’ brawl. It was the last hurrah in the House that Ruth Built. Like the Bronx neighborhoods around it, the big old barn had seriously decayed.

Modes of Recovery
Here’s how you rebuild a baseball legacy. The city buys and condemns your old rundown stadium, rebuilds it with tax money at four times the estimated cost, then leases it back to you. You pay the rent and keep most of the mountains of dough that roll in. You inaugurate your refurbished home with expensive imported talent (first Catfish, then Reggie) and grow richer than ever as the crowds return, hungry for a renaissance. You obscure the whole deal with curveball accounting while the city teeters near bankruptcy. The Bronx is burning, a summer blackout brings looting and chaos, Son of Sam spreads terror, but your team is back, big time. Three American League pennants and two World Series wins in succession follow.

Here’s how you rebuild yourself. You drop out of the college you had no business attending (relieving the guilt of wasted parental tuition payments), drive a Boston taxi for a few months, find a girl who will fuck you and love you, and then take off for San Francisco anyway with your best pal in a driveaway Mustang convertible. You love Kerouac and the Grateful Dead though you’ve missed the party out there. You start seriously examining yourself while dipping into esoteric wisdom (who didn’t in 1974 California?), keep yourself housed and fed with crappy jobs, and wander back east the next year a little bit smarter. You hook up with the girl again and commit yourself to answering that 10^th grade history question. You move back home, take classes during the day, and wait tables at night. You win the GPA pennant, summa cum laude.

Scenes From the Second Act
My team and I blundered through a decade of ineptitude and mistakes. They stunk up the American League for years while I stumbled through the weeds, pimply and awkward, unsure and vaguely ashamed. We busted out of our funk together. The Yanks beat George Brett and the Royals to win the 1976 pennant. The Big Red Machine then clobbered us, but the next two years Reggie and Munson and Guidry carried us home, just when my adolescent misery turned into young adult dilemmas of love, sex, work, and money.

I watched the decisive ‘76 playoff game on a balky old television in my Albany College apartment, banging on the set and twisting the rabbit ears. I coaxed just enough reception to see Chris Chambliss blast the pennant-winning home run and happily crazed fans rush the field. Chambliss got as far as second base, then charged ahead, like Jim Brown looking for daylight, flattening one guy on his zig zag route across the infield to safety in the dugout. Eleven years of frustration exploded in a pot-fueled, beer-soaked frenzy. The whole astonishing thing, with priceless Rizzuto commentary, is on YouTube.

I left Albany, returned to Boston, and stayed there 10 semi-bohemian years gathering postgraduate credentials. Then I landed in a faraway upstate New York college town and got more mixed reviews. They booted my ass instead of granting me tenure. It crushed me, that episode. (I got the news the day after my 40^th birthday.) It ground me to dust and left me depressed and homicidally angry. It took years to rebalance myself. But before I left that goddamn place, I met my wife Janet (a Bronx girl her entire life until I swept her away on a fateful research trip), and we produced two new Yankee fans. We packed up, fastened our three-year old son and infant daughter into car seats, and moved to a Westchester County suburb, solidly Yankee territory, where Janet had a high school teaching job she loved.

I scuffled through a two-year career reboot and renewed my acquaintance with metropolitan life. The best part of that, hands down, happened in the Bronx. I spent an excellent 15 years at Bronx Community College. Students liked me (unlike the upstate kid who advised me to “dress like an American”). Colleagues respected me. I succeeded wildly. I was finally hitting .350 again, a few short blocks from the site of Dr. Leff’s long-shuttered clinic. Meanwhile Derek Jeter hovered over our child-raising years in pictures, cards, posters, and a holographic refrigerator magnet. Ben wore his birthday jersey to tattered threads. His sister Susanna learned the game and the players and rocked her Yankee gear when I took her to games. Now she smartly manages her engagement to a hard-core Met fan. He’s a good guy. I can forgive this flaw.

Perfect, miraculous timing! I returned with a Bronx wife and found a Bronx job exactly when the new Bronx golden age began: six pennants and four World Series wins in eight years between ‘96 and ‘03. Jeter, O’Neill, Williams, Pettitte, Posada, and the incomparable Rivera. An impossible act to follow.

The new-old stadium is gone now, replaced by $2.3 billion of public/private investment across 161^st Street. I’ve attended 50-odd games in the new place. I hate the non-baseball noise, but the game is no less captivating; my wish for an upper-deck blast no less earnest than 60 years ago. Mantle then, Judge now.

The curtain is up on my third act. Here I am, imitating Pepi in the backyard, charging around the bases in my Little League jersey, hiding in the bushes to avoid a math test, sitting in a vanished stadium filled with shadows, ghosts, and clumps of stubborn, hard-luck fans cursing and slapping their foreheads at another error, another popup, another loss.

We carry our origins, our scenes and roles, everywhere and always. These selves never die. The wide-eyed child, the gawky, shy eighth-grader, the teenage loner angry at his failures, the almost-adult finding his way, the professor finally coming home. They’re all buried under the decades until (or unless) we dig them out.

Howard Wach is a semi-retired City University of New York academic. In his former life he wrote and published articles and essays about academic history and educational technology. He has now sworn off footnotes and bloated prose. His post-academic writing has appeared in the Palisades Review, the Jewish Writing Project, and Judith Magazine. He is currently mourning the Yankees’ most recent October failure and preparing to wait till next year. He also bangs on the piano when the spirit moves him.