What does it mean to you to be a fan? The specific response will vary from person to person, but I think we can all agree on one aspect: we root for the laundry. There are some bandwagon fans, sure, but I’d think the heavy majority of people reading this will be with the Yanks through thick and thin — through the dark days of the late 80s and early 90s before the championship run of the late 90s. We might not like certain players as much as others, but we’ll always cheer them when they come through in big spots.

Some people apparently do not understand this. Jay from Fack Youk found one such person: Jeff Pearlman. In essence, he calls us Yankees fans inhuman. No, really. To wit:

In other words, how can anyone with a human head actually attend, say, a Yankees-Royals or Yankees-Orioles or Yankees-Rays or Yankees-A’s or Yankees-Mariners or Yankees-Rangers or Yankees-Twins or Yankees-Anybody Except The Red Sox or Mets game and truly, strongly, lovingly, audibly root for the Yankees to win?

Look, I’m a fan of the game. I buy MLB.tv every year, hooking up a second monitor to my laptop so I can work while having a game on. I have an extensive RSS reader with general baseball blogs which talk about all 30 teams with relative parity. But when it comes to what really gets me riled up, it’s the Yankees. They’re my team. They’re your team. We live and die by them, and that’s what makes baseball all the more interesting. Not only is there an enormous set of data for us to pore over, analyze, and evaluate, but there’s the emotional level of rooting for your team. It’s always been part of the game.

Apparently, Jeff Pearlman can’t understand this aspect of the game and instead wonders how I am a human being. He then goes on to describe baseball in terms of movies, which I don’t think works. Movies are scripted. They’re supposed to make you like a certain character. No one rooted for the Empire? No shit, Jeff. That’s the way the movie was written.

Baseball is not scripted. It’s not an isolated experience, like a movie. It spans days, weeks, months, seasons, generations. The Star Wars story ended. Baseball does not. It makes for allegiances, and as men of integrity we don’t just run out on our team. And we most certainly do not find them “boring” when they’re the best team in baseball. In fact, that’s quite exciting.

Of course, we can expect this kind of talk from Pearlman at this point. After all, we need only throw his own words back at him: “Oddly, I like their moves more than the Yankees. Penny and Smoltz could easily win more games than Sabathia and Burnett.” Yes, that’s verbatim from his website. Let’s see that again:

“Penny and Smoltz could easily win more games than Sabathia and Burnett.”

Brad Penny and John Smoltz? Win as many games as CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett? This one deserves another appearance.

“Penny and Smoltz could easily win more games than Sabathia and Burnett.”

Of course, the Yankees have had recent field days with both of those pitchers. A few weeks ago the Yanks smoked Smoltz, and the Sox DFA’d him the next day. Last night they laid into Penny. Two guys who Pearlman thought could work out as well for the Red Sox as Burnett and Sabathia did for the Yankees.

(For more afternoon amusement, check out the rest of Pearlman’s predictions.)

So, what did we learn with this? That Jeff Pearlman questions the humanity of anyone who doesn’t enjoy the game like he does. Which is like a movie. Also, he’s terrible at predicting things. Embarrassingly bad. There’s no shame in rooting for the Yankees, even though it makes for some embittered narrative.