Men's Lifestyle March 25, 2026 0 Comments

From Doubter to Devotee: How Embracing the Yankees Transformed My Mindset and Boosted My Hustle

“Fine, Daddy—I’m a Mets fan from now on.” That stung like a curveball right to the heart—my kid, raised Yankees through and through, suddenly throwing shade at the family legacy over a dinner-time standoff. Seriously, who knew asking your kid to finish their supper could wield such power? Sure, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Mets fan (well, except for the obvious rivalry drama), but in my house, allegiance is gospel: you bleed pinstripes or you don’t. And yet, here I was, staring down the ultimate threat to my baseball pedigree from one of my eight-year-old triplets. How does one even respond to a betrayal that cuts so close?

But hey, before you judge this fair-weather dinosaur tossing around bandwagon chatter, hear me out. My path to “Yankees fan” wasn’t scripted in childhood like most—it kicked off in ’99, of all years, when I was still an outsider, fresh off the boat from Germany, and clueless about a sport called baseball. This clash of cultures, stats obsession, and immigrant assimilation led to a love affair that’s far richer—and messier—than any straightforward fandom tale. So, what does it really mean to pick a team? And can loyalty truly be inherited, or do we choose the battles and bragging rights on our own?

Buckle up—it’s a tale of survival, family, and the unpredictable terrain of sporting devotion that might just hit home, no matter where you’re from or what jersey you wear. LEARN MORE

7 min read

“Fine, Daddy—I’m a Mets fan from now on.” There it was, right in my own kitchen, the ultimate Uno reverse card, the dagger in any sports fan’s heart: your kid threatening to switch to your team’s rival because you had the audacity to ask him to finish his supper.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Mets fan. (I mean, apart from the obvious.) It’s just that in my family, we are Yankees fans. End of. You support the team your family supports. And now one of my three sons, eight-year-old triplets, raised from infancy loyal to the New York Yankees and steeped in their legacy—Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Murderers’ Row, DiMaggio and Mantle and Jeter and 27 world championships—was threatening to switch allegiances and pull for the can’t-stop-talking-about-’86 Mets. They know how to get to me.

From my aggrieved tone, you might assume that I’m a lifelong fan myself, raised in a Yankee household, but it’s more complicated than that. My path to the Yankees, and even to baseball, for that matter, is in some ways unusual, and at the same time as utterly typical—and typically American—as it could be. I became a Yankees fan in 1999. Yes, the year they won the second of three World Series in a row. I know, I know: How are you going to put up with sports pontification from a fair-weather, pom-pom-waving bandwagon jumper like me? Suspend your judgment until you read to the end.

I am not from this country. On my first day at work here in New York, not long after I arrived from Germany to take a job in finance in Lower Manhattan, my cubicle neighbor asked me, “Kid, do you like sports?” Are you kidding? I can (and do) recite stats to the point of annoyance to those around me; pretty much all of my friends I know through playing or watching sports. So yes, I’m a fan. But when he proposed we go to a Yankees game and saw my puzzled reaction of “Who are the Yankees?” I could see his heart break a little. This was pre-Internet, remember, and growing up in Frankfurt, I never knew the sport of baseball existed. In Germany, only soccer matters.

We ended up going to the game. We sat in the bleachers, drank substandard beer, and watched the K counter for Pedro go up to 17. The Yankees lost, and to the best of my (then) knowledge, nothing really happened in the game—but the place went crazy. Well, the part of the place where Red Sox fans were sitting.

They taped K’s to a wall in the stands—some pointed left, some pointed right. I didn’t understand a thing, but this sport had something that fascinated me, despite the shitty beer. Perhaps the detailed statistics and fanatical recordkeeping appealed to the German in me, or it was the drama of the small moments—who knows? It was the most un-soccerish sport my adopted country had to offer, with the least actual action, but I was hooked.

From that day on, I was a Yankees fan. I followed the team closely and went to the Stadium whenever I could. And like generations of immigrants before me, I began to feel like an American—I assimilated—in no small part through baseball. To be honest, declaring for the Yankees allowed me to make a decision: I was free to choose a team, unburdened by any family baseball allegiance. And okay, you can say I conveniently chose one of the most successful franchises in all of sports. But I had earned the right to root for a winning team, at long last. Because the team I inherited in my own home, well, let’s just say they make the Mets look like perennial champions.

15th february 1958: sullivan, the arsenal goalkeeper about to clear the ball during a match against eintracht frankfurt. (photo by edward miller/keystone/getty images)

gettyimages

The author’s beloved Eintracht Frankfurt, in the dark uniforms, going up against England’s Arsenal in February 1958, during one of their more successful periods. Still, on the day, Eintracht lost.

Maybe you have a similar story about why you root for the Steelers or the Celtics or the Cubs or, God help you, any team from Cleveland. Fathers, older brothers, uncles, grandfathers—in boyhood, we soak up sports and team allegiance from them like a tribal identity.

My story is like yours, only more so. Growing up in the ’80s, my first sports love was SG Eintracht Frankfurt, my hometown soccer club—a club with decade upon decade of utter mediocrity to its credit. It was my grandfather who got me interested in the game. He had been a player himself and was very good, and he was deeply passionate about soccer.

I don’t recall when we went to our first Eintracht match together, but I was very young. We attended every home game. Kickoff was at 3:30 p.m. on Saturdays, and our ritual was always the same. I would go over to my grandparents’ house for lunch, and he would have 12 bottles of beer lined up, drinking two before we left. The remaining ten were loaded into my backpack, and off we went on public transport to the stadium. Having gone all his life, he knew all the tricks to avoid the crowds. I was impressed by how he navigated us into the grounds. The train rides were fascinating: fans singing songs, opposing fans singing their songs, hooligans—the works. My granddad was well-known, so the hooligans left us alone.

The groundskeepers knew what was in my backpack, but they always waved us through, even if bringing glass bottles into punch-up central was generally not advisable. Once we got to our regular spot, he would lean against the barrier and start cheering. He explained the game to me: formations, offense, defense, the opponent and, of course, why they sucked. But mostly, I discovered, this was his therapy session. After beer six or seven, he would begin to talk about the war.

During the Second World War, my grandfather had been a soldier in Germany’s Sixth Army, the troops that ended up encircled in Stalingrad, the worst meat-grinder battle humanity ever shat upon itself. There in the second half, between shots on goal and corner kicks, he would tell me horrific stories about his friends getting blown up by tank fire, guts hanging out, screams, him being in a foxhole and a tank driving over it, circling above to bury him, death and devastation on all sides. Every other Saturday at the Waldstadion Frankfurt.

My brain didn’t really register all this, of course; I was just happy to watch the game and spend time beside him. And when he would sometimes cry, I thought it was because Frankfurt was losing—and we did lose a lot—but looking back, well, there was more going on. (It’s a skill that eludes me to this day, reading people’s emotions for what they are. My kids know, but I try. We of course have a word for this in German, Gefuehlstrampel, translated as “feelings trampler” but used more like “feelings idiot” in spirit.)

This article appeared in the April/May 2026 issue of Esquire
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At the end of the battle, my grandfather was taken prisoner by the Russians, one of the very few who survived. As happened with some other notable players, the guards in the prison camp noticed my grandfather’s soccer skills and decided not to send him off to the Siberian gulags. He was kept around to play ball. You could say soccer saved his life.

All told, my grandfather and I watched well over a hundred games together at the stadium (and Eintracht was consistently not a good club). So to say I am an Eintracht Frankfurt fan doesn’t do justice to how the intensity of my experience bonded me to my grandfather and to the team—shaped me at the molecular level. He gave me his deep connection to Eintracht and the sport, his existential despair at their mediocrity, and his fervent hope of sharing just one championship with me. “I want to see them win just once before I die,” he would say. It didn’t seem a lot to ask for a man who had been through what he’d been through. It didn’t come to pass.

To this day, though I live in New York, I hold season tickets to Eintracht Frankfurt.

So you can see how my son’s Mets comment was no small thing. If you have kids and are any kind of sports fan, you know what I mean. I’m sure you’re doing your best to raise them right—loyal to the right team, your team.

From the time they were small, my boys have heard me talk endlessly about the Yankees. We’ve watched games together since even before they understood what they were seeing. I’ve been a Stadium season-ticket holder for more than 25 years now, and I’ve taken them many times. We have memorabilia all over the house—including a baseball signed by Mariano Rivera, which they chose to play with one day, outside, because “we didn’t have another ball, Daddy.”

Coddled kids that this younger generation are, they don’t have to smuggle beer in for me, let alone hear excerpts from All Quiet on the Western Front. And although the Yankees are in a relative dry spell, I am not crying during the games. I hope I get to share a championship with them. And this being the Yankees rather than the Mets—or Eintracht, for that matter—my chances seem pretty good.