9 YEARS IS AN ETERNITY?!?! SINCE WHEN?

I was rooting for the Phillies. Plain and simple, I’m a Mets fan and I was rooting for the Phillies.

Before all you Mets fan go up and arms about this lets explain a little something. Since when did the Mets actually hate the Phillies? Here is the answer: 2007. That’s when the Mets collapsed and the Phillies won the division. Did the Phillies beat the Mets? Well they had some battles along the way but ultimately it was the Mets who beat themselves, then the Phillies running their mouths about it. Same thing happened in 2008, and the Phillies fans made sure to let us know.

Before 2007 the Mets and Phillies never had anything to do with each other. In the late90’s we fought with the Braves. Mets fans hated the Braves. The Phillies were not good; they sat there with the Marlins and Expos at the bottom of the division. Prior to the Mets-Braves battles of the late 90’s it would play out in one of three ways. The Mets were good and the Phillies were awful therefore there was no rivalry, The Mets were awful and the Phillies were good therefore there was no rivalry, or the final scenario, The Mets were awful and the Phillies were awful therefore not only was there no rivalry but who even cared?

So this whole Mets hating the Phillies thing is a little overblown. Yes in 2007, 2008, and even the first six months of 2009 before the Mets decided to be the worst team ever Mets fans hated the Phillies. By June though this just turned into scenario B, the Mets were awful and the Phillies were good.

A little off topic but my favorite the Mets and Phillies don’t really hate each other moment came this summer. One of my 15-year-old kids who I was a counselor for at summer camp, (I won’t say his name but he’s allergic to nuts and has been known to eat a cookie with nuts in it) is what most people would call a front runner. He is a Yankees fan, he is a Giants fan, and he is a Florida Gators fan. Lets remember he’s 15 so by the time he was at an age to start clearly remembering sports (you have to say that age is around 12) the Gators were becoming a power house in football and basketball. His excuse that he wasn’t a front runner with the Gators, “there was one year they had Tebow and they only finished ranked #6 at the end of the season.” 6 out of 119 teams, your right, that’s pretty awful. The story manifests when we took a trip to Philadelphia and he bought a Phillies hat (which he wore for the rest of the summer), when I asked (rather obnoxiously) if he was becoming a Phillies fan because they actually won his response was, “I’ve always been partially a Phillies fan ever since they’ve hated the Mets which has been forever.” Wrong. Pretty much you just confirmed everything and you became a Phillies fan when they became good, so this World Series was win-win for you, congratulations. I’m sure that two years ago you were a Celtics fan in the NBA and now you’re a Lakers fan.

I know that was very off topic but it had to come off my chest. The point is I hate the Yankees much more then I hate the Phillies so it was a no brainer for me to root for the Phillies. Then the Phillies lost and everything started to get annoying. The moment the Yankees won facebook was littered with Yankee fans statuses saying, “Yankees win!” “27 CHAMPIONSHIPS.”

There were many annoying things going here. One of which is the amount of casual Yankee fans that were doing this. Somewhere around October 10th the amount of Yankee fans quintupled, it was actually so bad that some true Yankee fans that I know were starting to question, “Since when the hell were you a Yankee fan.” I kid you not when I say that one-day when we had friends over at my apartment and the Yankee game was on, one of my friends who has been a Yankee fan since “forever” turned and asked “who is Brett Gardner?” I rest my case there.

The thing that always bothers me is the Yankee fans screaming 27 championships! Here’s the truth, since you and I were born and we started following baseball the Yankees have won 5 championships. No one cares right now what the Yankees did in the 20’s and 50’s when there were fewer teams, no black players in the league, and how much competition was there, they played the same two teams in the World Series every year. The fact that they have 27 total championships doesn’t give them any more advantage heading into next season. You’ve been around for 5 of these championships, not 27.

The most annoying part about last night, Yankee fans, what were you doing by your computers the moment the Yankees won? The big response from Yankee fans was “shut up if this were the Mets you would be doing the exact same thing.”

Well I hate to say it but those Yankee fans are right, I would be doing the exact same thing, WHEN I GOT HOME! There is no way in hell I would have been caught dead sitting on my couch watching this game with my computer. I would have been in one of two places, down the street at the sports bar celebrating with other fans. Or back in New York celebrating with many other fans.

This brings me to the most annoying status around, “FINALLY AFTER 9 YEARS THE YANKEES ARE BACK ON TOP!” AFTER 9 YEARS?! 9 YEARS HAS ALL OF A SUDDEN BECOME AN ETERNITY? I have several issues with this. First of all here is the reason you Yankee fans were at home with your computers, BECAUSE ITS ONLY BEEN 9 YEARS! It’s still been there done that with Yankee fans that winning the World Series isn’t special enough that you have to ruin your daily routine.

When Yankee fans were interviewed they commented how this one was special, it was for all the fans that stuck with the team after all the hard times. Hard times! What hard times? Between 2000 and 2009 the Yankees went to the World Series twice, the ALCS three times, and made the postseason every year but one. It was a hard time because the fans said if we do not win the World Series this year it’s a failure. They would say we’ve built the perfect team, were going to win this year. It was a hard time because Yankee fans are delusional and one sided and somehow decided that signing Jaret Wright and Carl Pavano was a good idea; it was because Giambi is the best first baseman out there. It was the delusion that the Yankee fans put themselves into that made these years a hard time.

I feel bad for Yankee fans now. You made the playoffs for 13 straight seasons and the past 9 are perceived as failures. Is it even fun rooting for them? It is more of a relief that they won rather then a celebration that they won. That’s why the Yankee fans were at home, it wasn’t an event that their team was in the World Series, it was just relief that they were there.

See the beauty of sports is there are ups and downs, some teams have longer ups then others, and some teams can’t get out of their downs. So yes, there are times, and it does feel like most of the time that your team just is not good and is not worth watching. But when the time for the “ups” comes, the whole season just becomes one long memorable ride. The Mets were good in 2007, they collapsed at the end of the season, I don’t remember much about that season. The Mets first recent up was in 2006, when they led a charge all the way to the NLCS. Every Mets fan knew something special was going on that year, and I remember every game of that season. Yankee fans don’t get that, they just get this ride of we need to win, we just need to, and then relief.

So 9 years is now an eternity. Lets not forget that most (not all) Yankee fans are Giants fans, the Giants won the Super Bowl two years ago. Why don’t you look at cities that have not had any teams win in recent memory. Before the Phillies won the World Series two years ago it had been over 25 years since the last time a team from Philadelphia won a championship. How about those fans in Cleveland, what about Seattle?

So Yankee fans, go along, talk and scream about how it has been an eternal 9 years since your last World Series. Go tell a Cubs fan about how happy you are that you finally won.

I hope that Cubs fan punches you in the face.

DON'T LISTEN ROONEY!

That’s right, I have opened up my drawer found this baby, dusted it off, and began to write in this again. I have decided I am going to try to write in this a bit more, though it defiantly helps that the alternative is writing a paper that I have been putting off for days now.

On Halloween 2009 something very scary happened. It did not happen in College Park Md. or in my hometown in New Jersey, it did not even happen on this continent. This event took place on the other side of the pond in Spain where Real Madrid midfielder/striker/foreword and resident best player in world Cristiano Ronaldo publicly urged former teammate and current Manchester United star Wayne Rooney to jump ship and join him at Real Madrid. Ronaldo’s logic; he should do it because he should follow the footsteps of former Manchester United greats David Beckham, Ruud Van Nistelrooy, and the latest Cristino Ronaldo and join Real Madrid.

I laughed this news off, for one that is the worst logic ever, for two when did Manchester United just become a stepping stone to going to Real Madrid, and for three, why would Rooney ever want to do that? Furthermore what is wrong with the players flanking Ronaldo now? Real went on a spending spree this summer brining in Ronaldo, Kaka, Karim Benzema, and Xabi Alonso, adding them to Raul and Van Nistelrooy who they already had. Do they really need Rooney? Does Ronaldo even need Rooney to be there?

Lets examine this from another angle. Who is to say that these two players even like each other? Yes they were able to co-exist as teammates, but that is because Rooney is a team first guy, Ronaldo on the other hand, is not. They say if you let Rooney just run on the field and kick a ball around for 90 minutes he’d be happy regardless of what position he’s in, you defiantly cannot say the same about Ronaldo. Lets go all the way back to the World Cup of ’06 in Germany, where in a match between Rooney’s England and Ronaldo’s Portugal Rooney received a red card for stomping on Ronaldo, starting a whole summers worth of talks questioning whether the two will be able to play on the same team again or not. They answered that question by winning the Premier League title.

However what would happen over the next couple of seasons was the emergence of Ronaldo, who became a tremendous goal scoring threat, and would start to move towards the middle of the field. This often caused Rooney to be exiled onto the left side of the field to make room for Ronaldo. Though Rooney did it happily for his team he has always said he prefers a more central role. The exit of Ronaldo allowed United to place Rooney back in the middle of the field and he responded by scoring 6 goals in the teams first 6 games, starting up talks that he was the best striker in the world, talks that had been killed in recent seasons.

So the question becomes, do these two players really like each other? If Rooney had to play with Ronaldo again he’d face further exile onto the left flank. He would be playing with a selfish person again, and he would also have to share time with the vast amount of strikers at Real's dispense; unlike at United where he only has to compete with the Bulgarian Bitch Dimitar Berbatov. Does Rooney even have a reason to want to go play with Ronaldo? He could remain in Manchester and continue to win titles as the face of the club, also playing in his home country remaining the poster boy for the English national team.

So there is pretty much no controversy here, provided Rooney actually thinks logically about it. It was the mere two seconds of thought about Rooney leaving that had Ronaldo scaring me, until I thought about it for about .34 seconds and realized how dumb Ronaldo could be sometimes.