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I respectfully disagree. It's not that I don't think there are a few Yankee fans capable of being so tasteless (they did chant "overrated" when the Yanks beat the Mariners in five games in the playoffs); it's just that even though Seattle won 116 games, they will never be on the radar for Yankee fans the way the Red Sox and Mets or even the Orioles are. Part of it is geographical,and part of it is historical; facing the Yankees may be the biggest series of the year for Mariners fans, but the reverse is not true for Yankee fans.

Seattle is on the radar - two seasons running, the Yankees have had to deal with them, and in neither of those postseason rounds did the Yankees have it quite the cakewalk that the smugger-than-thou contingency of Yankee fans would care to have you believe. The Yankees will have the usual suspects to trouble themselves with, no doubt, but it seems rather certain that they have another date with the Mariners coming in October. Who wins is anyone's guess, but unless someone decides to try fixing what isn't really broken, the Mariners look like they're going to be around for quite awihle. It won't kill the Yankees. That's one team that thrives on upstart competition.

Anyhow, I asked several Yankee fans today if they had seen any such Ichiro items, and all of them said no, with one of them using the same term as me -- that the Mariners were not even on the radar!

Well, it's almost the old story of no one hearing the bear bloviate in the woods, in a way, and while Ichiro Suzuki himself seems too nice to think twice about any such miscreance, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Especially since he was so heavily publicised last year that you'd have to go through some very extensive contortions to suggest that, historic considerations notwithstanding, he and his mates weren't on the radar. We'll probably have to agree to disagree here. But at least Lou Piniella wasn't dumb enough to pull his infield in in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game when he had the best relief pitcher in baseball for getting a double play grounder that could have sent that game to extra innings and a chance to win it...

The thing of it is, BluesDuke, is that how a team is doing has little to do with whether they are on the radar of hated teams, at least as far as Yankee fans go. The Red Sox can be in last place and we'll still hate them! As for Seattle, the most annoying Mariner ever (from a Yankee fan's perspective, at least!) was Ken Griffey Jr., with his incessant whining about how Billy Martin was mean to him when he was little, and how he hated the Yankees ever since.