It’s not clear whom my father hated more, the Yankees or Judge Judy. There’s no question whom he hated longer.

Some of my earliest memories involve sitting around a big Sylvania black-and-white television set and watching him mutter, “Yankee luck,” in between the Ballantine Beer ads as they piled up championship after championship in the 1950s and ‘60s. Over the years the objects of his scorn shifted from the epochal Mantle/Ford/Berra era to the louts and loudmouths of the Steinbrenner/Martin/Jackson Imperium to the infuriating perfection of Mariano Rivera (“the Devil,” my father hissed as Rivera strode triumphantly off the mound) and the Rivera/Jeter/A-Rod regime now coming to a close.

My father passed on to that great dugout in the sky just in time to miss what feels like this black hole of Yankee decline, a combination of injuries, age and ineptitude that has caused the Yankees to miss the playoffs for two years in a row for the first time since the early 1990s and left them facing the future with a decrepit core of players.

Image Credit... Barton Silverman/The New York Times

His sons have done their best to carry on for him. But after this Wagnerian week in the Bronx, my father would have seen two somewhat contradictory lessons. Betting against the Yankees, even with rust and decay seeping into their bones, is still like betting against the house. And Yankee hating is not what it used to be.