"Because of recent years, I find myself hating the Astros just as much as I hate the Red Sox," Michael Pepperman, a born-and-raised Yankees fan and current Corpus Christi resident, told Chron before the bitter American League rivalry resumed Tuesday night. Mike, 53, agreed with his Gen Z son.
"I've gone through the Boston rivalry for a long time. This is a newer rivalry, it's more recent, and it hurts more than any Red Sox rivalry, for sure."
The pair of fans donning pinstripes appears representative of the Yankees’ fan base at large.
Michael Kay, New York’s play-by-play broadcaster on the YES Network, surmised "a lot of [the animosity] goes back to the cheating," attributing much of the anger from Yankees fans toward the Astros' 2017 sign-stealing scandal. Robert Ford, a Bronx native who is now the Astros' radio broadcaster, offered a different theory.
"Yankees fans just aren't used to seeing a team that regularly beats them in the postseason," Ford said. "The Astros have won three ALCS against the Yankees since 2017. That's unheard of. That doesn't happen. It's hard for those fans to fathom."
Those pennants include the 2017 ALCS win that included the related sign-stealing that season, the 2019 ALCS with a memorable Game 6 walk-off, and an embarrassing 2022 ALCS with the Astros sweeping the Yankees along with a raucous Game 4 road celebration.
Yankees fans of earlier generations are simply spoiled. The dynasty of the 1950s came before the years of ongoing championship battles in the 1970s, and from 1996 to 2003, the team secured four championships and appeared in six World Series. The recent drought is galling—no championship since 2009 and only one World Series appearance. The main villains in Houston are mainly responsible for this latest drought.
Aaron Judge and the Yankees can't get over the hump against the Astros.
Yankees fans shudder at memories of Astros’ playoffs past. Houston fans delight in the continued beatdown.
"It’s been one sided every October," Apollo Dez, co-founder of the Houston content machine Apollo Media, said. "The Astros being the boogeyman is just something I have come to love every October."
The hostility in the crowd is clear. But what about inside the two respective clubhouses, managers’ offices and baseball operations departments? Publicly, you’ll only receive a tacit endorsement of an extra edge. Privately, the passion burns just as bright.
"Of course we loved beating [the Yankees]!" one former Astros’ baseball operations employee told Chron. "We kicked their butt and we wanted to keep doing it and doing it. It's part of what made that job so fun, honestly. We had that target, or, I guess they had a target on us they couldn't hit."
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