BRONX, N.Y. — During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a comforting and reassuring source of information. Much like his fellow Brooklynite, Joe Torre, Fauci exhibits that calming influence, also with a boss that isn’t afraid to voice his opinions, shall we say.
In a recent appearance with Desus & Mero on Showtime, Fauci dropped a nugget about his baseball fandom. It turns out the Brooklyn native did not grow up rooting for Dem Bums but rather the Bronx Bombers.
“I am,” Dr. Fauci said when asked if he was still a New York Yankees fan.
“People don’t understand that I grew up in Brooklyn and half of Brooklyn was a Yankee fan and the other half were Dodger fans,” Dr. Fauci explained. “The rest of the world doesn’t understand how you could live in Brooklyn and be a Yankee fan but I was a Yankee fan.”
On his favorite Yankee memory, Dr. Fauci spoke about his childhood idol, Mickey Mantle.
“I was an amazing fan of Mickey Mantle when he first came up, remember he was like 18-years-old when he came up and just the idea as a child I used to play baseball back then to have a hero like that that you could emulate and feel like you wanted to be,” Dr. Fauci said.
Dr. Fauci also went on to describe a dinner chat he had with legendary Yankees catcher Yogi Berra.
“My greatest post-Yankee experience was meeting and having dinner with Yogi Berra. What a great man,” Dr. Fauci said.
“He was a pretty serious guy, the thing we spoke about was how he would often hit pitches out of the box and how it would frustrate pitchers who would try to keep the ball away from him and he would slam it because it was like off on the lefthand corner of the plate. He loved that, he just loved that,” Dr. Fauci added of the notorious bad ball hitter.
Pretty cool stuff.
Whenever baseball returns, I nominate Dr. Fauci to throw out the first pitch.
