No professional sports team in America has been as dominant as the New York Yankees. The Yankees won their first World Series Championship in 1923, have made it to the World Series 40 times and, in 2009, won that series for the 27th time. The National League’s St. Louis Cardinals have the next best record having gone to the dance 17 times and winning ten.  Not even close.

Yankee fans point with pride to 44 former Yankees in the Baseball Hall of Fame and perhaps a half dozen more now playing or recently retired who arguably have the career statistics to merit induction into the Hall of Fame. All-time Yankee greats have entered into the American consciousness and are part of the American grain.  People who do not know baseball, or care for baseball, know Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle.  

Yankees have been so good for so long that they think winning is the norm. They don’t know what they’ve been missing.

Yankee fans have no idea, no concept, no understanding of the thrill, the exhilaration, the deep satisfaction of rooting for a victorious the underdog. I can hear Yankee fans, and others, scoffing at the idea that anything but routine success is worthwhile. 

But the rest of us who are foolish enough to identify with and emotionally invest in sports teams understand. We know winning against the odds, prevailing in the face of adversity, overcoming obstacles speaks to the human soul in a much deeper way than does having the financial wherewithal to purchase and field the top tier of baseball talent year after year. The Yankees are not the only rich sports franchise and they have not always spent their money wisely. But because they are in the nation’s top media market, they have always had money to spend including a quarter of a billion dollars (that's billion with a B) in the off-season prior to their 2009 championship run. 

Only the privileged root for the privileged to do well against an economic upstart. Is that what we have here, class warfare—rich baseball barons vs. the rag tag home team? Depending on your perspective, issues of economic envy or economic fairness may indeed influence the Us vs. the Yankees attitude.

But there is more at work here. Expecting your team to win and being disappointed that they were unable to take advantage of all their advantages is vastly different from knowing your team can win if they play their best. 

Yet that is the world most of us, even Yankee fans, live in. In real life the traffic light does not always turn green at our convenience. We face real competition at work and real challenges in our daily lives. There are no guarantees and the odds are seldom stacked in our favor. Still we know if we do our best today we can beat the odds and win. So here’s to our competitors, may they do well and push us to do even better.

If the opposition wasn’t as strong, we wouldn’t have to be as good and success wouldn’t be as sweet.
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