Jerry Green

Yankees still carry mystique of Joe DiMaggio's days

He once patrolled the outfield turf with grace and dignity where an unknown lad named Brett Gardner stood when the Yankees clinched this World Series the other night.

His name was Joe DiMaggio, a center fielder from my youth. To me, he symbolized the Yankees. They were perennial world champions back then. They won the first four World Series still fixed in my memory in overpowering fashion. They smashed the Giants twice and swept the Cubs, then the Reds.

And they played with this marvelous DiMaggio drifting to his left and to his right, back and forward with smooth, effortless movements. At bat, he would spray streaking line drives. And he ran the bases with fluid, loping strides.

He was the Yankees. He provided the aura and epitomized the mystique that are core elements of the Yankees.

That is how I viewed DiMaggio.

From the volumes of articles and biographies I have read about him, he was a hard man. Unfriendly, and at times nasty and selfish, a humorless, brooding man.

Yet he remains my vision of the Yankees even now, 70 years later.

The uniforms are the same as the No. 5 DiMaggio wore, the blue pinstripes with the NY superimposed over the heart when the Yankees are home. The home ballparks have changed, a new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx across 161st Street from the historic Yankee Stadium where DiMaggio and the others won their championships.

And the athletes are different, not as iconic perhaps. But that might just be my imagination.

There is linkage, I guess, from Babe Ruth to Hideki Matsui and from DiMaggio to young Brett Gardner and from Frankie Crosetti to Derek Jeter -- from Lefty Gomez to CC Sabathia and from Bill Dickey to Jorge Posada and from Lou Gehrig to Mark Teixeira. And from Johnny Murphy to Mariano Rivera.

The linkage is illuminated in the championships, decade after decade, from an old century into another that is still fresh and new.

But watching this nondescript Gardner and Melky Cabrera play center field for the Yankees in the October/November 2009 World Series, I was bemused. I giggled at the irony. It is my fashion, I guess, to be old-fashioned. But I kept wondering as World Series ballgames unfolded on television about who these guys were playing in the same uniform and in the same position as The Great DiMaggio and then the great Mickey Mantle. With the identical result.

Those were my emotions.

But I fear the emotions of the majority of the other baseball lovers in America were, as usual, pure hatred.

Team you love to hate

The Yankees are smug and they are haughty. They expect adulation and they are condescending. They demand our respect and reverence. The Yankees are so New York.

So on our side of America's great divide -- the Hudson River -- it is easy to hate the Yankees. It is an American notion to hate them with passion, for some peculiar reason. Fie on the Yankees.

I do not regard myself as a fan, in any rooting sense. In my profession, it is not proper to cheer for teams, and certainly not for the Yankees. I regard New York as the city of the uncouth. That is my ancient belief, enhanced because of the brunette who clip-clopped past me one evening on Madison Avenue as I was strolling to dinner and turned around and blew her cigarette smoke into my face.

The peculiar reason, I have concluded, for the mass American hatred of the Yankees is -- envy. Plain, powerful envy -- in many cases as plain and powerful as jealousy.

They Yankees are good -- and have been throughout my lifetime. They have now won 27 World Series championships. They are better, most years, than the Tigers -- better than the Cardinals, better than the Dodgers in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles, better than the Giants in both the same New York neighborhood and San Francisco. They are better, certainly, than the Phillies and the Angels and the Twins.

They are the best and most successful franchise in the history of American professional sports.

They, therefore, are envied and hated by baseball lovers from Pennsylvania to Alaska.

Beyond that, the Yankees -- and George Steinbrenner -- are hated by scores of my outlander journalist colleagues. Certainly, the cheerleading sportswriters in New York don't write any better than the men and women who write with grueling passion and sophistication from, say, Chicago, or Los Angeles, or Boston, or Philly. Or Detroit!

Give them their due

Envy again ... or distaste for New York arrogance, that swaggering superiority complex that stuffs the Manhattan media.

I believe that winning so many championships and being so successful and having so many great and almost-great ballplayers are lousy reasons for hatred.

Manhattan Island -- true confession -- happens to be the place of my birth. I escaped into permanent exile from New York the first chance I had.

But as a lad, I was treated to the graceful brilliance of The Great DiMaggio -- while not a fan of the Yankees.

And the memories still sizzle.

I feel no hatred for the Yankees.

Indeed, I admire them for their accomplishments.

I admire them for Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, for Frankie Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri, for Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing, for Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris and Whitey Ford. And now for Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Hideki Matsui and Mariano Rivera.

But mostly, I admire the Yankees, and their history and their tradition -- and their aura and their mystique -- are symbolized by Joe DiMaggio.

Jerry Green is a retired Detroit News sportswriter. Read his Web-exclusive column every Sunday at detnews.com.