As a secular Jew and red-state refugee — or, if you will, a godless coastal elitist — I tend to value chosen loyalties over unchosen ones. The two biggest exceptions to this are family and sports, and in my case the latter is intertwined with the former. I inherited my Yankees fandom from my New Rochelle-raised father, and my loyalty to my team is stronger (or at least less ambivalent) than my loyalty to my religion or the town where I grew up. I simply can’t imagine a fandom that’s based on anything more rational or less fundamental. Sitting down and drawing up lists of pros and cons to determine which team to support — or throwing over one team with a sigh to support another — strikes me not only as bizarre but morally wrong.

This is why I have very little patience for the materialist critics of the Yankees under Steinbrenner, or of any dominant large-market team. Liberals who judge all sports on the basis of payroll are like conservatives who judge all art on the basis of morality. It’s just plain not what being a fan, or a rival, is about. It’s one thing to mock or attack Yankees fans for our team’s mythos, Curt Schilling-style; that’s ritualized trash-talking, and for every time you zing us for our dominance, our arrogance, our self-seriousness we will zing you right back for wishing deep down that you could measure up. But it’s quite another to hold up specific actions taken by the management — the bloated payroll, the jacking up of seat prices — and say “This is why I hate the Yankees. You’re a Yankees fan. Defend this.”

But as illegitimate as the criticism may be, the blame lies with Yankees fans for allowing ourselves to fall into the enemy’s trap. Look, bleacher creatures the world over: there is a difference between nation and state, between tradition and policy, The Franchise and The Management. We don’t have to come up with an excuse for every excess of the Steinbrenner Administration, nor do we have to concede defeat, or at least discomfort and ambivalence, when we cannot. Just because we take pride in our history of dominance does not mean we have to be blind to the problems posed by the current (im)balance of power — or, on the other hand, culpable for it.

I’m coming to the conclusion that what we need is some sort of J Street/Juicebox Mafia moment for Yankees fans: a fandom for the 21st century that draws a clear distinction between loyalty and chauvinism. We can admit that we need to be clear-eyed about the decadence of the new Stadium clubhouse, but we will make no excuses for misting up when we walk among the monuments.

It’s all well and good to debate the politics of baseball (or, heck, mass entertainment more generally) — I haven’t yet heard any convincing proposals to combat payroll inequity, for example, but I’m open to them in theory. But while I may agree with you full-throatedly when you say as we walk into the Stadium that the luxury-suite epidemic is bad for the game, if you do the same thing as we walk out I won’t be able to reply: I’ll be too busy belting out “New York, New York” with Sinatra, obnoxiously, loyally. If you see contradiction or hypocrisy in that, I feel some pity for you, because I can’t imagine a more fulfilling way to be a fan.