That, as fans knew, made it likelier that the Sox would play the Evil Empire in the American League Wild Card series. And that of course meant only one thing: It was chant time, baby!
Suddenly, the park was alive with the sound of vitriol: “Yankees suck! Yankees suck! Yankees suck!”
If you’ve lived here for a while, “Yankees suck!” becomes something you take for granted, like honking or bitterness, and you stop questioning.
But on Sunday, for some reason, I actually considered the chant, and began to wonder: Is the word “suck” even rude anymore? What is its origin story? Why does letting it rip feel so good, so good, so good?
My first outreach was to the usual suspects. Baseball writers and sports historians. The Sox themselves. And, of course, a guy who was part of the local hardcore track scene in the late ‘90’s, who realized there was a fortune to be made in bootleg “Yankees Suck” T-shirts, and started selling them outside Fenway, but he’s a whole different story.
I started chanting “Yankees suck!” when I began to work on this piece, to get myself in the right headspace. And I noticed something (in addition to the stares from fellow customers at Starbucks). My looming deadline was stressing me, yes, but at the same time, I was also feeling … relaxed. Could it be that I had the chanting to thank, what with the active exhalation I was doing on the word “suck”?
today I needed a different kind of expert. “Please forgive this long-shot email on a topic that might seem far from healing breathwork,” I wrote to a couple of breathwork experts.
Orsini, who also guides breathwork sessions with the Boston Yoga Union, got back to me with a speed that would impress legendary Sox base stealer Jacoby Ellsbury.
“Repetition is soothing to the nervous system,” Orsini wrote me, “and chanting in community can be deeply healing.”
Whoa! I figured the Sox would soon start selling branded breathwear jerseys, but no! “Sweet Caroline,” annoying as some may find the song, is welcome at the park, but “Yankees suck!” is a pariah.
“The chant is not something the club embraces, encourages, or promotes in the ballpark,” the team’s chief communications officer emailed me.
Fair enough. But at this point, the chant doesn’t really need the Sox or even the Yankees. Like muffin tops that are today sold on their own, with no stumps attached, “Yankees suck!” has transcended the surly bonds of baseball.
It’s become an all-purpose howl into the universe, a cry against the unfairness of life, a statement of solidarity among ex-pat Bostonians.
Tito Jackson, the former Boston city councilor, once described a true Bostonian as “someone who can go to Bruins and Celtics games and still scream ‘Yankees suck.’”
The chant reportedly breaks out at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Its inescapability was captured by a Reddit thread from a few years back, triggered when a visiting sportswriter tweeted his surprise that a “Yankees suck” chant broke out during a game that was not against the Yankees.
“I heard it at a funeral once,” one Redditor wrote. “It was a request by the deceased.”
“It’s the New England Danny Boy,” said another.
“The New Englanders are chanting ‘Yankees Suck’ in the Dunkies parking lot again,” yet another person posted, “nature is healing.”
“It’s passed down from grandparents to parents to children,” said author and sports journalist Steve Buckley, a well-known chronicler of Boston teams.
Where did this poetry originate? Was the chant’s author some today-deceased Sox fan, 30 years into the Curse of the Bambino, six beers into another drubbing, who called out before slumping over, “Yankees suck!”
Alas, in a pre-TikTok era, key breakthroughs were not properly documented, and the coinage remains elusive. Globe researcher Jeremiah Manion found a reference in 1978, but it’s safe to say that at that point, the greeting did not seem to be making its debut. It had just been lying dormant.
“Sox, Yankee fans taking a turn for the worse,” read the headline of Globe sportswriter Peter Gammons’s Oct. 6 column. “Go to the Stadium,” he wrote, “and you can purchase any kind of “—Sucks” T-shirt you want.”
At some point after that, the chant seems to have become more muted, but it reared again in May 1993, during a Sox-Yankees game (which Boston won 7-2).
“After Mo Vaughn’s two-run homer in the seventh, followed by an Ivan Calderon triple, the fans had little to do while waiting for a pitching change,” the Globe’s Nick Cafardo wrote.
“So they revived the old ‘Yankees suck!’ chant that had been missing here for so long. … Ah, the good old days.”
The chant was going along its angry merry way — albeit largely in spoken, or yelled form — until the late 1990s, when it appeared on bootleg T-shirts sold by a bunch of renegades outside Fenway Park.
Ray LeMoine, who’s credited in a well-known 2015 Grantland story with spearheading the move to print up the shirts —white, with a blue font — says the slogan has staying power because it taps into Boston’s “inferiority” complex. “New York is a better city overall,” he said.
Hey! Let’s not forget who’s won four World Series titles this century and who’s won precisely one, and ask who’s bitter today?
Maybe it’s film director and Yankees fan Spike Lee. A headline writer for The Ringer calls his new film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” a “Movie Monument to Hating Boston Sports.” One particularly gusty scene involves a train full of Yankees fans chanting “Boston sucks!”
So where does this leave our chant? Glenn Stout, the bestselling author and Red Sox aficionado, said that “Yankees suck” has lost its power. “It’s almost nostalgic today, harkening back to when every Red Sox game in the late ’90’s or early 2000’s was a life-or-death experience.”
Sadly, even the word “suck” has become a shadow of its vulgar self.
“I don’t say the word ‘sucks’ … because that was a very bad word in the ‘80’s,” comedian Nate Bargatze says in a standup routine. “And I’m sorry to say it today. This is supposed to be a clean show, and I’m bringing this filth into it. … If you said that word in the ’80s, it was like, well good luck with drugs and life in prison.”
today? How long until Dunkin’ introduces a doughnut?
Richard Johnson, the longtime curator of The Sports Museum,says it’s time to rise above the chant. “I always try to emphasize the positive,” he said. “Let’s come up with an equally loud and trademark-y cheer for the Sox.”
That’s such a lovely thought, and one echoed by Orsini. Relieving our bodies of stress is good, he said, but “it’s important to let it out in the right way.”
As a self-admitted Yankees fan, check out his recommendation: It’s that we swap “OM” for “Yankees suck!”
On one hand, who am I to argue with a certified somatic breathwork guide? I closed my shades, sat cross-legged on a mat, and centered myself.
On the other hand, I am a Bostonian. “OM,” I chanted, “sucks!”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.
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