There's something special between a fan and a team

The New York Yankees are off to the best start in their storied history.

Tuesday, on the 100th anniversary of the Yankees' first game, they defeated the World Series champion Anaheim Angels 8-3 behind Jeff Weaver, whose 15-0 mark for their starting rotation (the only such streak to start a season since 1900), was the best beginning for starting pitchers ever by a major league team.

On Saturday, they owned a 20-4 record, a franchise-best season start.

This is the good news and the bad news. Because nearly everybody who loves baseball revels either in the Yankees' success or their failure.

Loving the Yankees or adoring some other team and hating the Yankees is part of the all-American sport of baseball. No other sport has the tradition — team traditions, family traditions, even national traditions — attached to it that baseball does.

Karen Seely, 53, of Cottonwood Heights, used to watch baseball with her grandfather as a child and developed a love for the great Yankees — Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig — for their history and for baseball.

In 1998, she got her first chance to watch her team play in Yankee Stadium, and not even a hurricane was going to stop her. She and her son, Matt, had tickets for a game on a Saturday in August, the day Hurricane Bonnie was expected to hit New York. So they flew to New Jersey on Wednesday, having no idea how to get to Yankee Stadium, asked directions all along the way, took a subway during rush hour, managed to get tickets from a scalper and got into the Wednesday game.

Seely says she is "not a crier," but she shed tears as she and Matt made it to their seats in her beloved Yankees' home that day.

Seely has a spare bedroom at home devoted to displays of Yankee memorabilia, including Bobblehead dolls, a Yankees Barbie and a 17-year-old Yankees Cabbage Patch doll, the entire 1998 team in Beanie Babies, pins, a Bronx license plate, Sports Illustrated covers from the years they won the pennant, commemorative Wheaties boxes featuring Yankee players, books, golf balls, even the light-switch cover. Well, you get the idea. Oh, yes, and a Yankees blanket has made it to the master bedroom. No traditional quilts for this woman.

David Wankier, music teacher and softball coach at Delta High School, is a third-generation Yankee fan, following the tradition of his grandfather and his parents and passing it along to his four children. Babies not yet born in the Wankier family have Yankees shirts and toys. His 21-year-old daughter plans to marry Derek Jeter.