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When I was about seven years old my father told me that all I needed to know about hitting a baseball I could learn by watching Ted Williams, and that all I needed to know about hitting a golf ball I could learn by watching Ben Hogan. He was right on both counts. Dad also instilled in me a real affection for both games. It is a love affair that has lasted a lifetime. To me two of the most beautiful places to be are on a golf course as day moves toward evening and the shadows lengthen across the fairways and greens and in a packed baseball stadium moments before the first pitch of an important game.

In the case of golf, my love of the game has only grown. But in the matter of baseball it is a much more tumultuous relationship.

It would be overstatement to say that George Steinbrenner has made me hate baseball. Indeed, every time the owners, agents and players engage in their ritualized dance in which they seem to trip over each other trying to kill the game, something like Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS happens to save the sport by reminding us how it produces moments unlike any other in athletics. Despite greed, steroids and revolving-door rosters I will always follow the game. What Steinbrenner has managed to do, however, is get me to hate the Yankees, a franchise I had adopted as my home team when I moved to New York City nearly 33 years ago. It was around the time I realized that the Yankee payroll of more than $200 million this year would qualify it as the third most-generous donor in tsunami aid if it were a nation that I decided I could not only no longer root for them but would also have to actively cheer for them to fall flat on their rich butts.

As with golf, I don't remember a time when baseball was not a part of my life. Family members tell me I watched on television as Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in the 1956 World Series for the New York Yankees, but I was six years old and I don't remember it. There are vague memories of the Series in 1957 and '58 when the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves traded world titles. But baseball really started for me in 1959. I saw my first major league that season -- the Yankees (who were ALWAYS on the Game of the Week and thus captured much of my childhood attention even though I grew up 52 miles from Pittsburgh) at Cleveland in mammoth Municipal Stadium. I also listened that year to broadcasters Bob Prince and Jim Woods on KDKA radio the night Harvey Haddix of the Pirates pitched 12 perfect innings in Milwaukee -- and lost. And I vividly recall the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette headline after the Chicago White Sox defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 1 of the 1959 fall classic, the pun "An Early Wynn" forever burned into my young brain.

On an October afternoon in 1960 I was leaning out the window of a school bus trying to get better reception on my transistor radio when Bill Mazeroski homered to lead off the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 to give the Pirates the World Championship over the Yankees. I have a cassette of the radio broadcast of that 10-9 classic in my car. It nourishes me through the long winter that begins when the World Series ends and lasts until spring training games are broadcast. Yes, the Steelers are a passion, but that is just one day a week. The memories of a child falling asleep to the crackling static from a cheap radio can only be of baseball -- the every day game.

From the time I was seven years old until I was 22 -- the year I moved to New York -- Roberto Clemente was the right fielder for the Pirates. A giant painting of The Great Roberto making a backhand running catch hangs in my office, as does a black-and-white photo of Forbes Field, the home of the Pirates from 1909 through 1971. They are reminders not only of my childhood but also of a time when a team like Pittsburgh could afford to keep a player like Clemente for his entire career. As happens to many small-town kids when they move to the big city, I was led astray. I gave into my long-time fascination with the Yankees to become a fan. Part of it was just proximity. They were the team of my new hometown. In the late 1970s, before I was married and became a parent and had thus had time to burn, I'd go to about 35 games a year at Yankee Stadium. I'll not go there again unless the Pirates are playing a World Series game in the Bronx.

The starting pitching rotation for the Yankees this year -- Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Mike Mussina, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright -- will have a combined income (about $64 million) that will surpass the total payroll of about a dozen teams. I'm sorry, that's just not right. Baseball -- and now I am talking about the hierarchy of Bud Lite Selig and his boys -- is once again electing to turn a blind eye to a stain on the game, just as it chose to do with steroids. The first thing I did when the Randy Johnson deal was finalized was to go on-line and get the roster of the Pittsburgh Pirates. I have to start familiarizing myself with my new old team -- or my old new team. Not sure which it is. For some reason, my allegiance never slipped from the Steelers -- probably because of that once-a-week thing -- the way it did from the Pirates. But I'm going home now, thanks to Steinbrenner.

And you know the best thing about all of this? I think Steinbrenner's one-year-at-a-time philosophy is about ready to whack him in the face with a pie. Buster Olney hit the nail right on the head when he titled his book about the seventh game of the 2001 World Series "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty." The Yankee teams that won four world championships from 1996 through 2000 were teams. Players like Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez and Scot Brosious were not Hall of Famers, but they were winners. Honestly, I'd rather have them than Gary Sheffield, Jason Giambi and Alex Rodriguez. What have they won?

As a baseball fan I have this question for you George: How good do you really feel going into the season with the ace of your staff being 41 years old (Johnson), two others (Pavano and Wright) never having pitched in the pressure cooker of New York, a fourth (Brown) who was a bust even before he punched a wall and fifth (Mussina) who seems to get going when the going gets tough? Oh, and by the way, Marino Rivera is not his own self any more. Not only do I now hate the Yankees, but I also feel in my heart of heart that this team as currently constructed could turn out to be one of the most expensive flops in the history of sports.

Or maybe that is just the Pittsburgh Pirate fan in me speaking.

Ron Sirak is the Executive Editor of Golf World magazine