So on Opening Night, Joba Chamberlain faces Frank Thomas, a future Hall-of-Famer. It’s the eighth inning, the Yankees are up by a run, and this guy’s got over 500 home runs and two MVP Awards. He’s about to turn 40, but he’s very much still a force with a bat. And he looks mean. (Every interview I’ve ever seen of him seems to suggest a decent and intelligent man, but he looks every bit as mean in the batter’s box as the kindly Mariano Rivera looks on a pitcher’s mound.) Heck, his nickname is The Big Hurt. Joba strikes him out to end the threat, and pumps his fist. And, whoa, the outcry! Here we go again. The other 29 teams can do it and it's "youthful exuberance." A Yankee does it, and it's "arrogance" and we have to worry about the opposing team being offended. Which is sort of like Democrats being afraid of questioning Republicans on their military strategy, since they'll call us "unpatriotic." They do that anyway, so get over it.

By the way, do you know how the team got its name? They were originally called the New York Highlanders, because their ballpark was at the highest elevation on Manhattan Island, and they had a team executive named Gordon, and the Gordon Highlanders were a famous Scottish regiment in the British Army. But "Highlanders" was too long a name to put in a newspaper headline. Then the Great George M. came out with this song, and, though he was himself a Giants fan and a good friend of Giants manager John McGraw, people associated "Yankee" with "Americans" and "American League," and "Yankees" could fit in a headline, and could even be shortened further to "Yanks." In 1913, after 10 years as the "Highlanders," the "Yankees" made it official.