Over there, a Yankees cap isn't about baseball power

When I told friends I would spend spring 2002 backpacking through Europe, many who knew me expressed the same doubt: "But you'll miss the start of baseball season."

I shrugged. "I've been to Opening Day. I've never been to Paris."

In truth I was tired of baseball. In 2001 my team, the Seattle Mariners, trounced everyone during its record 116-win season but was trounced in the championship series by the New York Yankees. So instead of the Mariners getting to their first World Series, the Yankees played in their 38th, and the next spring the Yankees appeared poised to make it a Jack Benny-esque 39. Who wanted to be around for the start of that?

Like many dispirited romantics before me, I went to Europe to forget.

But Europe wouldn't let me forget. I spotted my first Yankees cap an hour after landing in Amsterdam.

A New Yorker, I assumed, eyeing him hotly. Then I saw Yankees caps on the heads of obvious locals, people who don't watch baseball. Was this some kind of post-Sept. 11 sympathy? A new Amsterdam link to what was once New Amsterdam?

Curious, I approached a Dutch teenager sporting a red version of the cap.

"You a Yankees fan?" I asked.

He looked confused.

"Your cap," I pointed. "Yankees. Baseball." I mimicked swinging a bat. "You like baseball?"

He began to blush and shake his head.

"Then why wear it?" I wondered aloud. "Is it because of some rock star?"

He got excited and almost shouted, "Limp Bizkit!"

I nodded sadly. Once again rock 'n' roll was warping the minds of a younger generation.

In Paris it only got worse. I saw the Yankees cap on a pretty woman walking along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, on a young Frenchman holding hands with his girl in the gardens of the Musee Rodin and on a high school kid on a field trip in the Catacombes. It appeared on a surly German teenager sitting at the base of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and on an old Frenchman playing boccie ball in the coastal town of Cassis, France.

None had any clue about the Yankees and their winning ways. It was just a cap to them. It was available.

Occasionally I'd see a cap from another team -- the White Sox or Braves -- but these sightings were rare. At a hostel in Brugge, Belgium, I ran into a guy in a Mets cap, but from the way he was lounging I could tell he was American.

"You hear if the Mets won?" he asked after we began talking baseball.