In midsummer of 1965 I sat in Edgartown, Massachusetts, (an eleven year old,) reading the sports pages of The New York Times. Whoever was writing was wondering what the hell was going on. The Yankees were not playing like the Yankees ought to. They had lost more games than they had won and they were in sixth place. The writer assured me that the Yankees would, as usual, put on their big late surge and win. I asked my father what he thought. He frowned. "They don't look very good to me," he said; "What does the Times say?" I gave him the paper and pointed out the funny thing about the article was that the writer seemed to be taking a certain amount of pleasure from the Yanks' misfortune. We couldn't understand it.

In October 1966 the Yankees finished the season in tenth place. In 1967 they put players on the field like Charlie Smith, Ruben Amaro, Steve Whitaker and Horace Clarke. Whitaker was especially pathetic because he was one in a set of the "next Mickey Mantle" series. Whitaker came up to the Yankees, hit a cluster of home runs in his first week and then began to strike out. His collapse was awful to watch. Fortunately for him, not too many people came out to the park to look. Other "next Mickey Mantle" prototypes were Roger Repo, Bill Robinson and Bobby Murcer. But Whitaker handled the pressure worst. I kept his autograph on my wall long after he disappeared from the majors. I admit it's cheap mentioning that, but it's true.

Nineteen years, almost to the day, that he was unceremoniously dismissed in the midst of a ceremony, Phil Rizzuto stood on the field during Yankee Old Timer's Day and watched his old teammate Billy Martin take cheers as the team's new manager. Rizzuto was gray by 1975 and wore inexplicably large tinted aviator glasses which made him look like a 1,000,000X blown up slide of a house fly. If I were pretending to be omniscient I would tell you how Rizzuto felt watching Martin walk on the field to a huge ovation. ("Phil felt a lump in his throat as big as a hardball . . . he remembered how Casey had always said Billy would someday manage the Yankees . . . ")

Instead, I will tell you how I felt. I thought to myself: "This bum had better bring in a pennant. New York has enough crooks, skunks and incompetents running it without the Yankees bringing in another. I haven't enjoyed watching Bill Monboquette and Joe Verbanic playing terrible baseball for the last dozen years. I want to see a World Series."

Mr. George Steinbrenner, who dabbles in politics now and then but over all is not much more of a louse than most owners of the Yankees have been, has brought a lot of very fine players to the team. None of them looks like Joe DiMaggio or Ryne Duren but they are, nevertheless, superb players and they won 97 games for the team during the course of the season. A satisfying year.

During the bad years, if you took the "D" Train up to the Bronx and the Stadium, you could look forward to ducking firecrackers and waiting to see if Steve Hamilton would throw his famous Folly Floater (a high arc-lob which one day sent a bad-tempered Cleveland Indian literally crawling on his belly back to the dugout after he had whiffed three times on it; this the same day Bobby Murcer hit four consecutive home runs in the Next Mickey contest and Ray Fosse got hit by a cherry bomb which came flying from the second deck after he had started a brawl with both teams running out on the field to shove each other). Now you can go to see baseball played. Now you who hate the Yankees can go and hate in the old bitter and passionate and utterly unavenged way that you used to. It will do as much good now as it did them. Your poison is welcome. It means that at least for a moment the Yankees are the Yankees once more, and thanks for it.