Fifteen Hundred

Good morning Fackers. Hopefully everyone had an excellent weekend of food, family, tradition, presents and of course drinking (and if not, Chinese food and movies). It was a busy one for me, starting with a friends party on Wednesday night, then a Christmas Eve Wigilia at my aunt's house, Christmas Day at my Mom's and a huge annual gathering with my father's side of the family yesterday, scheduled squarely over the Giants' game miserable and embarrassing failure. Luckily there was no TV so I was spared the agony.

Amidst all the festivities last year, including a trip up from New York, I managed to find some time to write the first post for this blog (well, technically the second). Fast forward exactly one thousand five hundred posts and you'd arrive at this one.

I didn't have a specific goal in mind when I started Fack Youk other than to write about the Yankees and when we started off, it was much less Bronx-centric than it is now. We didn't have the Casey Stengel banner picture, the knockoff Red Sox font, the motto that turned away countless advertisers, the black and white photo policy and aside from me, the cast of characters here was totally different.

There was a lot I didn't realize about writing back then. I didn't understand that it wasn't as much about what you say but how you say it. And that who is saying it matters even more. The most important thing about maintaining a blog is establishing a voice and not coincidentally, it's the hardest thing to do. A lot harder than I expected.

The humble thing to do would be to say that we've come further than I could have imagined over the past year, but that's not really true. Success is easy to imagine. You write a couple of posts, people like them, you get a few links and it's easy to imagine that in no time you'll be rolling in pageviews and ad revenue. In reality, what look like ramps to untold amounts of traffic are really just spikes that return a certain baseline in a few days (at most). What makes a blog successful is the day to day grind.

As our pal Craig (then only of Shysterball) told me when I reached out to him for advice shortly after this whole thing began:

Work on pacing yourself and putting out regular, predictable content that people can come back to on a regular basis, and soon they'll bookmark you or put you in their reader, and from there things grow steadily.

The thing that I truly could not have imagined is how much content we produced over the past year - over four posts a day, including weekends. Those are the kind of details that you usually gloss over when you set out to accomplish something (even if you don't know what that something is). There was no way I could have possibly fathomed the amount of hours that I'd spend playing the role of Sisyphus in an attempt to put something new and interesting on the top of a web page. It's somewhat ironic that in a medium so instantaneous, true success and progress takes a long time.

Thankfully, the Yankees had about as good of a year as could be expected and have continued with a great offseason thus far, which has made all of the effort put into this blog seem more worthwhile. We all got awfully lucky in that respect.

Last but certainly not least, thanks to everyone for stopping by. There are a ridiculous amount of Yankee blogs out there and the fact that you choose to come here is what makes it worth putting in all the effort. Hopefully this time next year we'll have more to celebrate and be thankful for. In the meantime, we'll continue with the vulgarity and analysis.

The "Yankees' Mount Olympus" And The Tragedy Of YES

I have to admit, I enjoyed Derek Jeter's record tying hit more than I expected last night. My buddy Frank and I had just settled in at my sister's place and flipped on the TV during Brett Gardner's at bat in the bottom of the 7th, with Jeter waiting in the hole.

After his line drive squirted down the right field line and Jeter took of his helmet, acknowledging the crowd while standing on first base, I said, "Wow, it would be awesome to be there right now".

And then I realized that the best thing about being at the Stadium at that moment wouldn't have been hearing the crowd noise firsthand or feeling like I was one of the people Jeter was responding to with the helmet tip or being able to say that I witnessed something special that night. No, the best part of being there would have been that the absence of a coarse voice incessantly reminding me how "special" and "historic" the moment was.

Like Cliff from Bronx Banter said his recap of last night's game, "It’s an impressive accomplishment that might have meant something to me had the YES Network not killed it to death by overhyping it beyond all reason."

For the people in attendance last night, the moment didn't get overhyped. I'm sure there were some graphics up on the scoreboard, but there was no one standing in between them and what happened on the field and the reaction in the stands. No one yelling in their ear, "LOU GEHRIG HAS COMPANY!!", like there was in mine.

When Jeter was standing on first base, Michael Kay said, "The bedrock of this franchise since 1996, the Yankee Captain now stands atop the Yankees' Mount Olympus with Lou Gehrig". And with that, the deification of Derek Jeter was complete.

As Matt demonstrated earlier, if one were to create a hypothetical "Yankees' Mount Olympus", it certainly wouldn't be based on who had the most hits for the franchise. Yet Kay had clearly crafted that phrase for that precise moment and been sitting on it for days, betrayed by the fact that he used it during the intro pieces for the two games of the double header.

Amazingly, it was the radio duo of Sterling and Waldman who were calm and collected by comparison. When Jeter rounded first and the stands started to erupt, Sterling simply said "And Jeter has now tied Lou Gehrig at two thousand, seven hundred and twenty one hits...". Suzyn described the cap tip, what the scoreboard said and the reactions of the fans while Sterling added that the Rays dugout was also applauding Jeter. They focused on the present instead of preemptively trying to declare the moment as historic.

As much as the events of last night helped congeal and quantify Jeter's presence among the greatest Yankees, it also badly exposed the most unbearable aspect of the YES Network.

The network apparently is convinced that it is vital to their success to make sure that every viewer in constantly reminded of the history of the Yankees at every possible turn. The dramatic irony is that YES turns moments that should be enjoyable to excruciating with each attempt to frame its significance, making them more memorable for the ridiculous way in which they are covered than for the moments themselves.