Baseball Season Preview: New York Yankees

You might remember, from back at the beginning of the NFL season, when we previewed each team by having a writer we liked write about their favorite team.

Well, we're less than a month away from the start of baseball — spring training is here! — so it's time to do the same thing in the baseball world. Every weekday until the start of the season, a different writer will preview his/her team. We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, Where Their Team Stands. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever.

Today: The New York Yankees. Your author is Amy Blair.

Amy Blair writes The Week In Craig column for Animal New York, and formerly for The Black Table. She is also responsible for the popularization of the phrase "smoky tornado." Her words are after the jump.

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At a party last week, a friend of mine was telling me about how she hadn't been able to go to the bathroom for the past eight days. She had tried laxatives, stool softeners and fiber supplements, all to no avail. I was utterly dumbfounded. By the grace of god I go, like, five times per day. As such I simply could not conceive of the unimaginable discomfort of not being able to squeeze anything out. What can I say? I've got what some of my more backed-up acquaintances might consider a "magic colon," of sorts.

What does this have to do with baseball, you ask? Well, thinking about my friend's little "problem" got me thinking about how blessed I am to not have to struggle in this way. And it made me really appreciate how lucky I am to have it so easy. And that's when it dawned on me ... the connection between baseball and my sphincter for which I had been searching all these years! Friends, I'm here to say that I'm both a proud pooper and a proud Yankees fan, and by my word the two things go hand-in-hand.

I don't think that there is a person alive who can claim to not enjoy the relaxing satisfaction of a particularly good bowel movement. After all, a pleasurable poop is one of the finer things in life. That being said, for the same reasons why I'm willing to shell out a whopping forty-two bucks for an Upper Tier ticket to a Yankees game (a Dugout Box ticket costs $32 in Kansas City, to give you some perspective), I'm willing to eat whole grain cereal in the morning and have five servings of fruits and veggies throughout the rest of the day. When it comes to overall satisfaction, you get what you pay for. If I wanted to crap out a fossilized log once a week, I would eat rice and morphine at every meal. And if I wanted to see my team fail over and over again, I'd probably root for the Red Sox.

Sure, I pay a ridiculous twenty-seven dollars for a Budweiser Tall Boy and a box of Cracker Jacks at Yankee Stadium to help keep Alex Rodriguez in his twenty-seven million dollar salary. But I also get to boast of my team's twenty-six World Series Championships, and this year we're looking at that magic number ... twenty-seven.

Sure, we may not make it to the World Series every year. But, like a fantastic shit, being a Yankees fan, overall, is pretty damn satisfying.