ISAT IN MY seat, unnerved. The sold-out crowd couldn't have asked for a more ideal evening for a baseball game in March: temperature in the mid-70s, the slightest breeze, no threat of rain in clear Florida skies. I was on vacation, far from the snow and cold pestering my home in Philadelphia.
This was the first time since October, when I'd watched the beginning of the end in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, that I was attending a live Major League Baseball game.
So what was wrong?
The sound of a ball hit foul echoed through the stadium, and off the stone walls that towered behind home plate. As the noise diminished, I became acutely aware of another audio sensation. The silence was deafening.
I surveyed the scene of navy caps and pinstripe jerseys from my seat in Section 120, high and outside on the third-base line in Steinbrenner Field. Presumably, they were people like me: die-hard fans drawn to the magic of spring training, taking a short vacation to catch an early glimpse of their favorite team before opening day.
But these were Yankee fans - and I'm a Phillies fan, and over the course of nine exhibition innings, I realized what made us so distinctly different.
I grew up on the south side of the invisible border that separates Yankee and Red Sox territories in Connecticut, surrounded by Bronx Bomber enthusiasts throughout my childhood.
I SUFFERED through four championships and six World Series appearances, all the time loathing "the home team" and everything it stood for. I resented the obscene amount of money spent to compile rosters destined for a dynasty, and the perennial success that inevitably ensued. I once wrote that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for Walmart.
As I waited for the postgame fireworks two Fridays ago, I realized that what bothered me the most about Yankee fans wasn't what they were rooting for, but how they were rooting. There's a sense of entitlement among pinstripe followers. Their assumption of victory results in an odd apathy throughout most of the season. Games aren't nightly events, but merely the inevitabilities that have to be endured until autumn - when the stakes are raised.
I thought back to earlier in the afternoon when I watched the Braves and Phils in Clearwater, Fla., and how much more comfortable I was sitting cross-legged on the left field berm - my rear kept dry from dew by a broken-down Bud Light cardboard box.
