I quit the Dodgers today. No, I wasn’t on the team … well, I was kinda on the team for a really long time, but about five years ago the Dodgers told me they didn’t need me anymore, that they didn’t really need my support and that they were perfectly capable of NOT winning the World Series without me. They said that I could still hang around if I wanted. I think they still want me to go to their games, yeah I think they do, me and the millions of other saps that they’ve been kicking in the balls for the past five years. But they’re not willing to do anything else for me like holding down ticket prices or selling me one beer for less than the price of a thirty-rack or allowing me to tailgate in their parking lot after making the three-hour drive to the stadium … or making it possible for me to watch them play baseball on my TV. I thought I could hold on. I can’t. I thought it could still be fun to follow them armed only with a newspaper and a transistor radio. It’s not. So I quit.

The main reason I need to formally quit is so I can pick up another team. You can’t have two teams at the same time. And so today I officially pick the New York Yankees. I’ve always like Joe DiMaggio and Derek Jeter and Lou Gehrig. It’s funny that I can watch a team that plays 3,000 miles away every night, but I can’t watch the Dodgers. One of the big reasons I now follow and root for the Yankees is that they play on the YES Network. That’s the kind of positive approach I’m looking for. The Dodgers play on the NO network and I can’t take their negative fuckin’ attitude anymore.

The great myth surrounding the Dodgers and their indifference toward their fans is the perception that this TV nonsense is just business. It’s not. It’s personal. It’s the Los Angeles Dodgers looking straight into the face of millions of Dodgers fans and saying, “Fuck you! I don’t care about you, I don’t need you” … Or worse, “I think you’re stupid, I think you’ll still be a fan no matter how I treat you and at some point, you’ll just accept no TV and no attempt at customer service as the new normal.”

We’re not stupid. And on behalf of all former Dodgers fans, I say, “No, No, fuck you!”

That five years ago the Dodgers grabbed the money, the ridiculous over-payment offered for their broadcasting rights, is not surprising. That was, in fact, just business. But after the first season when it was clear that they had a TV deal that would shut-out the vast majority of their fans they should have taken action. If they cared about the fans they should have altered the deal. They could have given some money back to subsidize the fees asked of the other carriers. Or they could have terminated the deal entirely and accepted a smaller sum that would have enabled the cable company to offer Dodgers games at a lower price. If they cared about their fans, they could have done that. We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars here, so even at a smaller number, the Dodgers would have still cashed in big. The cable company never had any responsibility for doing right by the fans, that responsibility was always squarely on the shoulders of the Dodgers.

The Dodgers put business before family. Think of all the unconditional love and unconditional dollars the fans have heaped on Magic Johnson over the years. You thought you and Magic were tight, right? Your ol’ friend Magic played you for a sucker.

It won’t be that hard to give up the Dodgers, after all, like millions of other people who live here I haven’t seen them play in five years. Maybe it’s a sad modern reality, but there are 162 regular season baseball games so if you can’t watch your team on TV you really can’t follow them. So I don’t know these guys, and you don’t miss what you don’t know.

It’ll be better this way. The Dodgers have been losers now for well over a quarter century. They routinely trade their best players so that they can become Hall of Famers for someone else. They produce Rookies of the Year but not championships. I can buy Dodger Dogs at the market.

I’ll miss Duke Snyder and Fernando Valenzuela, but shit, now I have Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. Life goes on. They say pinstripes are slenderizing. Go Yankees.