NY YANKEES: HOW MLB BROKE TWO LONGSTANDING TRADITIONS

NY YANKEES: HOW MLB BROKE TWO LONGSTANDING TRADITIONS 

By: Matthew Blittner

Pride and Tradition.

These two words sum up the NY Yankees' franchise perfectly.

Outside of winning, the most important things to a sports team are its' self-pride and its' traditions.

No team knows this better, or fully appreciates this as much as the Yankees. For over a century, the Yankees have conducted themselves with a dignity that has placed them among the most successful franchises in professional sports.

In today's Major League Baseball there are many who view the game as boring and say that it needs an injection of "fun." Maybe those voices are right -- to a degree.

Players such as Bryce Harper and Yasiel Puig have led the charge in ushering in the "fun." But where some of their exploits are a welcome shot in the arm, there are some things that are better left the way they are.

If you are a baseball fan, chances are you know that there are certain things that just don't happen. 

You don't stare at a home run unless you want to get drilled in your next at-bat. You don't steal bases if you're up by a lot over your opponent. The list goes on. These are known as Baseball's unwritten rules. This is tradition, and it's what helps shape the game throughout the passing generations.

Major League Baseball and its' teams have varying sets of traditions, but no team has more longstanding traditions then the Yankees. 

In their 114-year existence the Yankees have two traditions that have never been broken -- they don't wear names on the back of their jerseys, and ever since they moved into Yankee Stadium in 1923, they wear pinstriped jerseys at home.

That is, until Major League Baseball decided to violate both of these traditions in one swing.

This weekend -- August 25-27, 2017 -- was dubbed, "Players' Weekend," and part of the event was that every player on every team would wear specialized jerseys with their selected nicknames on the back.

Every team, including the Yankees, was forced to wear jerseys that would be more at home in a Men's Beer Ball Softball League. The quality of the jerseys aside, the nicknames on the backs went mostly unrecognized to the fans as not every player has an actual nickname.

The purpose in nicknames is for them to be fun and memorable, and they are earned through performance and then given by your teammates or coaches. 

Here though, the players chose their own nicknames, most of which, fans had never heard of, and will likely never hear again.

Some players had fun with this, but there were others who took exception with this ridiculous mandate.

Brett Gardner -- the longest tenured homegrown Yankee -- refused to soil the tradition of his team by wearing a made up nickname on his back, and on a jersey that wasn't pinstriped. 

When Gardner told Major League Baseball that he refused to take part in their absurd plans, he was told by executives that this wasn't a choice and that he had to comply.

Eventually, he was forced to wear the specialized jersey, but he at least was able to escape having a made up nickname, as the executives allowed him to simply wear his last name on the jersey.

When the Yankees took the field Friday night for the first of three games against the Seattle Mariners, they became the first players in the history of the franchise to take to the Yankee Stadium field without their iconic pinstripes, and with names on the back of their jerseys.

The younger fans mostly found this a hilarious side note to the games, while the older fans found this to be an abomination. Sacred traditions were tossed aside for what? For MLB to attempt to garner higher ratings? To turn the younger generation into devoted fans?  

For the most part, these jerseys and nicknames were nothing more then a footnote in the actual games, as not even the craziest of fans -- the Yankee Stadium Bleacher Creatures -- were willing to acknowledge the made up names on the back of the players' jerseys. During Stadium roll-call -- another longstanding tradition -- the Creatures chanted the players' real names like they always do.

So MLB, looks like your plan failed. All you did was tick-off one generation of fans, while failing to make an impression with another. Oh, and let's not forget your biggest crime -- you broke two of the longest standing traditions in MLB history! MLB I hereby find you guilty, see you at sentencing in two weeks.