The Yankees of Mediocrity Had Their Own Strange Charisma After the 1968 season, Mickey Mantle walked away from a Yankees team that had fallen into mediocrity. Somewhere amid the endless Long Island sprawl of aspiration, a father sits in his living-room chamber, sipping from his beer chalice as he considers the various financial threats to his split-level castle. Meanwhile, upstairs, his oldest child ponders more urgent matters as he lies on his bedroom floor, oblivious to the boyhood squalor that envelops him: The dirt-stiffened blue jeans; the grayish balls of formerly white socks; the ripped Hawkman comic books; the scattering of carefully collected wheat-ear pennies, some already worth twice their face value. Even the close air, redolent of a bologna sandwich misplaced and long forgotten, goes unnoticed. Scrawny, bucktoothed, conditioned by bullies to greet each day with an anticipatory wince, the boy is poring over piles of small, rectangular documents spread out before him, searching for answers to why he has been denied his rightful place among the wreathed champions. He is confused beyond the confusion that is part of being 11 years old. You see, thanks to an inheritance from his brooding father downstairs, he roots with every ounce of his body for a perennial baseball underdog: the New York Yankees. As I write this, I hear the hue and cry of outrage from across the continent, the angry dissent loudest in certain long-suffering precincts: the rain-wet hills of Seattle, the landmark-cluttered District of Columbia, the north side of Chicago, the lakefront of Cleveland. Even Boston, forced by two recent World Series victories to shed the lovable-loser status so meticulously cultivated over several generations, takes wicked umbrage. The New York Yankees? As underdogs? Insert regional epithet of choice. Ah, but the indisputable documentation was laid out upon that bedroom floor back in the summer of 1969, and the boy has it still. That is, I have it still, stored in a Rockport shoebox whose location will remain classified: hundreds of old baseball cards, courageously saved from the sporadic cleaning frenzies that disrupted our home's natural disorder. Most of the cards are worth less than the face value of those wheat-ear pennies; some even bear the singe of fire damage. Strange how I don't even remember burning out the eyes of California Angels outfielder Rick Reichardt with a magnifying glass. I keep them all as evidence, along with well-thumbed Yankees yearbooks that feature the mostly forgotten pre-Steinbrenner, Mike Burke, and a few crumbling newspaper clippings from early 1969, when Mickey Mantle, my broken idol, announced that he just could not play anymore, and I sensed, even then, that the Mick would never quite adapt to a work world without grass. The Yankees cards among my tired collection are like mug-shot exhibits, prepared for presentation to the Court of the Beleaguered. From Jake Gibbs, catcher without bat, to Walt Williams, outfielder without neck, they confirm my childhood status as underdog. Here is Bill Robinson, one would-be phenom, batting .196; here is Steve Whitaker, another, batting little better. Here is first baseman Joe Pepitone, sporting his game-day toupee. Here is second baseman Horace Clarke, who so disliked body contact that he often failed to make the relay to first on potential double plays. Here are Roger Repoz and Ruben Amaro, Andy Kosco and Charley Smith, Fred Talbot and Hal Reniff, Frank Tepedino and Gene Michael and Joe Verbanic and Thad Tillotson and Johnny Callison and Danny Cater and Curt Blefary and Jerry Kenney and Jimmy Lyttle and Celerino Sanchez, poor Celerino Sanchez, and so many others you do not remember, probably by choice. As hollow as it might sound, though, these were my heroes. I ached and rooted for every one of them as they failed daily on baseball's Broadway stage, Yankee Stadium, facing two opponents every time they stepped onto the field: the American League team of the moment and the Yankees teams of the past. My father's Yankees. Who knows when a child first becomes baseball-aware? I fell under the game's spell at age 7, in the upside-down year of 1965. My mother came from rural Ireland, where sport meant soccer, rugby, hurling and blood; she found baseball to be pastoral - almost like turf-cutting, only with uniforms. Still, she became conversant in the exploits of our central, post-Mantle heroes - Bobby Murcer, Mel Stottlemyre, Roy White and Steve Hamilton - because she was a wife and mother, resolved to maintain the domestic peace that she occasionally managed to achieve. My father, though, was a New Yorker to his marrow, no matter how many times Gotham turned its concrete back to him. Raised in the belly of the Depression, he moved to or was evicted from one borough after another, never enrolled in one school long enough to develop friendships, never finding urban roots. He finished high school at night, found his higher education in the Army during the Korean War, and returned to work on Wall Street - literally, on the street - as a cold-call salesman. Dan Barry is a national columnist for The New York Times. This essay is adapted from "Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Loved (and Hated) Team," to be published in April by Ecco/HarperCollins.