Jack Mankiewicz woke up Monday morning and turned to his girlfriend Gabrielle Scelzo. He had a question not uncommon in relationships when things have reached a breaking point, when it appears there is no path forward.
“What are we going to do about this? Do you think we’re going to make it through?” he asked her.
The issue at hand was deadly serious: He roots for the Los Angeles Dodgers, she roots for the New York Yankees. Their clubs are meeting in the World Series, if you haven’t heard. And they are trapped in a 1,000-square-foot Brooklyn apartment with the enemy.
It’s a battle playing out in bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms in New York and Los Angeles. Every year in cities across the country, this sort of internecine conflict undoubtedly happens. But with so many residents of the country’s two biggest cities moving back and forth from coast to coast, a Dodger fan entwined with a Yankee fan might be the most common mixed-couple combination there is. It probably doesn’t help matters that these two teams have faced off more often in the World Series than any others.
“The truth is, sports loyalties transcend relationships,” Mankiewicz said. “I just made this baseball documentary where one guy was telling me his ex-wife was like, ‘Why are you so obsessed with baseball?’ He responded, ‘I’ve been in love with baseball since I was 5. I’ve only known you for five years.’”
Mankiewicz and Scelzo started dating five years ago.
“I get so mean when I’m watching games, when the Yankees are losing,” Scelzo said. “I like Los Angeles, but I’ll say it’s a disgusting, dirty city. I really get crazy. Afterwards I’m like, what did I say?”
Mankeiwicz’s father was a Dodgers fan, and Mankeiwicz grew up in the Pacific Palisades a die-hard fan of the boys in blue. Still, for his girlfriend if nothing else, he has tried his best to embrace the New York Yankees. As a New York transplant, he feeds off the energy in the city when the Yankees or Mets win in the playoffs.
But even when he worked on the documentary series “The Captain,” about former star Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, he found himself unable to fall in love with the franchise.
“The whole evil empire thing is hard to escape,” he said. “There’s just something about them that rubs me the wrong way.”
Maybe it was in his upbringing. Scelzo said Mankiewicz’s father, a mild-mannered man who is usually nothing but sweet, remarked about the Yankees recently: “There’s something about their pinstripes. I just hate them.”
Across the country, the same problem persists.
In Los Angeles, Jamie Lopez said her husband’s “crazy” Dodgers-supporting family has been trash-talking her for being a Yankees fan. Even though Lopez is from Los Angeles, she is a lifelong supporter of the Yankees because so much of her family lived in New York.
She also points to an epiphany she had a quarter century ago, when she went to a Yankees game and sat in the bleachers. “It was life-changing,” she said.
She lived in New York for six years, then moved back to Los Angeles and met her husband, a Dodgers fan. His family is so into the Dodgers that when the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020, they turned a birthday party for Lopez’s niece into a World Series celebration.
“Everybody is like, ‘I’m so worried for you guys,’” Lopez said.
Some couples embrace it.
“For our family, it’s like the holy grail,” said Amy Horn, a Yankees fan from New Jersey who moved for work in the early 2000s to Los Angeles, where she met Mike Horn, her Dodgers fan husband.
The Horns have two teen sons, one named Derek after Derek Jeter. But Derek is a Dodgers fan. They also have a dog named Dodger. The whole family is going to Game 1 of the World Series. They bought tickets in the reserve section for $1,000 per seat.
“Will we be at odds with each other? One hundred percent. Will we get on each other’s nerves? One hundred percent. There’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world, though. This is good back and forth,” Mike said.
After Game 1, the Horns will watch the series at home, where they have a setup designed to preserve domestic tranquility. Amy watches in the garage while Mike watches in the living room — the two rooms are separated by the kitchen. But you can still hear the other yell when something good happens for their team.
“Say Gerrit Cole gives up a home run, Derek will run into the other room and go, ‘Mom did you see that?’” Mike said.
Amy said the silver lining of a Dodgers win for her would be seeing her husband and children celebrate.
But Mankiewicz says in his case, he needs it more than his girlfriend.
“I don’t know if I’d call her a fair-weather fan, but she doesn’t live and die with the team as I have,” he said. “I think it means just a little more to me.
“I’m a man. We have to sublimate a lot of emotions into our sports teams because we’re repressed. The Dodgers, they’ve got to do a lot for me. Gabby has a healthier relationship with her emotions. She’ll move on. I really want to win this one.”