At the Xtra Mart convenience store and gas station in Vineyard Haven, manager Joe McCarthy wears one of those caps nearly every day. He quips that he’s a low-key Yankees fan. He’s so low key, he stenciled a Yankees logo on his personal parking space at work, to stir the pot. “People have urinated on it, poured beer on it,” he says, “but most of all they laugh at it.”
How did these Joe Yankees get corrupted in the first place? Well, if you’re a wash-ashore who grew up in or around New York during the 1950s and 1960s – the era of the longest running Yankees dynasty, the westward defection of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, and the frail infancy of the New York Mets, all rolled into one – the Yanks are in your blood forever, no matter how far from The Bronx you roam. Your football or basketball loyalties might soften over time, but your affections for the Yanks? Fuggedaboudit.
Manhattan-born Joe McCarthy, who coincidentally shares his name with the highest-winning coach in Yanks history, began attending Yankees games as a babe in arms. Robert “Coo” Cavallo, owner of Edgartown Paint Store, grew up a Yanks fan in Mets country – Forest Hills, Queens – but regularly traveled by subway to see the Bronx Bombers at Yankee Stadium with his high school buddies. Bill McConnell, a recent executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, contracted Yankees fever as a boy in Peekskill, New York, during Joe DiMaggio’s heyday. Stop and Shop Edgartown’s meat manager Johnny VanPutten is a Bronx native who moved to the Vineyard as a small child. Alas, the spell was not broken: His father, a die-hard Yankees fan, remained in New York, and Johnny visited him regularly. When Johnny wasn’t inside Yankee Stadium, he was gazing over it from his father’s high-rise hilltop apartment. Johnny’s supermarket colleagues and fellow Yankees fans John “Uncle Johnny” Gabour and Sherri Ward, similarly have roots in the greater New York area. Born after the Yanks’ mid-century glory years, they inherited the Yankees gene from their parents and grandparents.
The roots theory does not explain George Valentzas. He’s the culprit who posted the boastful baseball headlines from the New York tabloids that used to (dis)grace the windows of the Oak Bluffs Post Office, where he’s worked for the past fourteen years. George was born and raised in Worcester and has never lived outside Red Sox Nation. His cousin is the Vineyard’s own Paul Thoustis, a former Red Sox minor leaguer. Yet George has been a Yankees fan since childhood. “I always liked being different, just in fun,” he explains. “Somebody had to be a Yankee fan instead of a Red Sox fan. Everyone was a Democrat, so I decided to be a Republican.” On the day he retires, he intends to fly a Yankees flag from the post office flagpole.
The lineup of Vineyard Yankees fans seems endless. At least one, according to scuttlebutt, is a defector from Red Sox Nation. Another reportedly stuck a Yankees logo on his delivery truck until the boss put an end to it.
A quick primer for readers from other planets: The Red Sox–Yankees rivalry got going after the 1918 season when the Sox famously traded young Babe Ruth to the Yanks. This was akin to the idea that Manhattan was sold for twenty-four dollars worth of beads in the 1600s. Over the next eighty-six years, the Yankees were the most dominant team in baseball, besting the Red Sox in World Series trophies by a margin of twenty-six to oh. The Sox misfortune was widely known as the Curse of the Bambino, and season after season, decade after decade, Sox fans swore they’d “reverse the curse.” Yankees fans snickered at this folly until 2004, when
Oh, enough about history. The point is, the Sox and Yanks may have the most ironclad rivalry in American sports. On the Vineyard, friendly, mutual razzing is as much a sport as baseball itself. Yankees fans tend to have a favorite foe-friend or two. Joe McCarthy regularly trades barbs with Larry Johnson of Morrice Florist in Vineyard Haven. In April, after Red Sox center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury stole home at Fenway Park and helped embarrass the Yanks in a three-game sweep, Michael Donaroma, who owns Donaroma’s Nursery in Edgartown, e-mailed Coo Cavallo a vintage photo of a grinning man clutching an oversized broom. Friend Michael Dolby brought Coo a replica of home plate with the tender inscription: Jacoby Ellsbury Stole Your Dreams! Yankees S__k!
“Most Red Sox fans are really Yankee haters rather than true Red Sox fans,” says Coo.
“Some people who call themselves Red Sox fans can’t even tell you the name of a member of the team,” says Uncle Johnny.
Joe McCarthy finds the conversation more interesting when the other person really knows the game – “when someone understands the way the ball is released from a pitcher’s hand, or how Ellsbury stole home against [Andy] Pettitte on the mound.”
Connoisseur Joe not only knows the game, he also knows players and managers, dating back to his youth, when his family had season tickets close to the field. “We never bothered them for autographs or anything,” Joe says. “That’s why they gravitated to us.” Today, he’s pals with a few Red Sox players as well, thanks to Yankee friend Alex Rodriguez, who introduced him to Manny Rodriguez, then with the Sox. Joe’s girlfriend is a Sox fan (ditto, Johnny VanPutten’s girlfriend). Her die-hard Red Sox family used to look askance at the mixed relationship – until Joe brought them to a few games at Fenway. “They love me now,” he says with a smile. He may have gone a step too far when he introduced his girlfriend to Derek Jeter, the smooth Yankee bachelor. “She went gaga.” She may defect for all the wrong reasons.
Yankees fans of the Vineyard pat themselves on the back for their congeniality in Sox territory. In the paint store, Coo displays an old photo of Red Sox star slugger Ted Williams with Yankees DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. At Xtra Mart, Joe painted the Red Sox “B” logo on several parking spaces near his own hallowed Yankees space. When the Red Sox sweep, he removes his Yankees cap for a while, demonstrating that Yankees fans can be gracious even when the chips are down. Which forces us back to 2004:
In the race for the American League East title, the Yankees fell apart just three outs shy of winning the series from the Red Sox, who went on to win the pennant. And then the World Series. Curse reversed. Yankee hearts everywhere plummeted. Did they feel a tad better, now that Sox fans could quit nine decades of bellyaching? No. Still, George Valentzas kindly took his newspaper clippings out of the post office window. Joe posted a sign in his store: Congratulations to Red Sox Nation. Uncle Johnny, for one, swaggered in fun: “You got one World Series in eighty-six years? We got twenty-six. Talk to me when you get five.” As of 2007, it’s two down, three to go.
Vineyard Yankees fans don’t always feel the love in return; some Red Sox fans seem to still carry that eighty-six-year-old chip on their shoulders. When the autumn breezes begin to blow, and the regular season winds down to a few critical games, Coo says, “That’s when the gloves come off.”
“After a loss, some of the Sox fans at Stop and Shop are ready to chop someone’s head off,” says Uncle Johnny. “They have no sense of humor.” Which is why most Yankees fans do not watch Yankees-Sox games in Vineyard bars. If the Yanks move ahead on a bad call, who needs a Sox fan with a chip on his shoulder and a few drinks under his belt? According to independent researcher Uncle Johnny, the Island has no Yankees bar. “I’ve been to every place on this Island that serves beer. I haven’t found a Yankee hangout yet.”
Despite all their years on-Island and all that business about congeniality, most Yankees fans don’t embrace the Red Sox as their second favorite team. “I take nothing away from them,” says Joe. “They have a great organization and a quality team. But I will never be a Red Sox fan.”
Coo still tries to get to Yankee Stadium once or twice a year. In younger days, he and his fellow Yank-loving cronies on the Vineyard Charlie Murano and Norm Rankow would often make the round trip in a day, sleeping in the car overnight in Woods Hole, if need be. This spring, when Coo couldn’t make it to opening day at the Yankees’ newly minted stadium, Charlie brought back an opening day cap for him. Coo will save it as a collector’s item; he won’t wear it in the store.
“Because of customers throwing paint,” he quips.
The Red Sox are writer Shelley Christiansen’s second favorite baseball team.
