There are no agnostics on the question of the Yankees. The team is, at turns, beloved and detested, which is fitting for a franchise for which victory has come with seeming inevitability. The record is numbingly familiar: since the team's establishment in 1903, the Yankees have won 26 World Series championships and 39 American League pennants. Considering that the team did not win a pennant until 1921, that works out to roughly 45 percent of the league's titles and just over 30 percent of the game's championships in the last 82 years. In the 1920's the Yankees won six pennants and three World Series; in its spectacular run between 1947 and 1964, the franchise won 15 pennants and 10 world championships. No team in any sport comes close to rivaling their record over the past century.

The Yankees have also made money. They were the league's top drawing team for 33 years between 1921 and 1960, with attendance figures that twice surpassed the collective numbers of as many as four other franchises in the eight-team American League. How did they do it? That question is at the core of Henry D. Fetter's first book, ''Taking On the Yankees.'' Fetter has set out to explain how the Yankees, over the course of their long history, have managed to defeat every team that tried to topple them from their singular perch. His focus is not on the game but on the front office. The Yankees, he argues, were for the better part of the 20th century the model of corporate baseball efficiency. Not only did they do almost everything right, but their challengers managed, in crucial ways, to get the big things wrong.

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Money alone does not make winners -- consider the lavish payroll and sorry record of the Mets. The Yankees, much to their detractors' chagrin, have been not only wealthy but, for much of their history, wise. In the end, we are left to wonder how, with their owners off their backs and their coffers full, the men who ran the Yankees managed to keep winning, year after year, era after era, on the field and off.

I can vouch that on the subject of the Yankees, one is likely to come across some awfully virulent opinions, but I'm not so sure that the team is "beloved" in the same sense that the Cubbies, for instance, are beloved by their fans. I think one of the reason people are Yankee fans is that they win so often and so regularly, and watching baseball is simply more exciting when you can root for your team and not constantly be let done.

For myself, I enjoy watching baseball even when the teams I root for are not involved (as in this season's playoff games, especially the extremely hard-fought just-completed series between the A's and the Red Sox), but like watching good baseball better than watching bad baseball, and good baseball by a team I follow even more. It's rare that both the Yankees and the Mets play good baseball in the same season -- usually, one team is up, while the other is down -- and following both allows me to watch good baseball more often.

Of course, when they're both playing well, and especially when they play each other, I'm screwed.

Update: I've been looking at how payroll rankings correlate with the post-season. In this first round, the divisional playoffs:

#1 beat #18
#5 beat #26
#12 beat #6
#20 beat #8

One could conceivably draw two different conclusions from this, either that payroll rankings don't really correlate with success in the post-season, or that they do in the American League (the first two) and don't in the National League. I really wish that I could ask that question of Bill James, because I'm certain he'd know how to go about designing a study to answer it, but I can't so all I can say is "I don't know." I suppose it is possible that having the DH in the American League means they can use more veteran pitchers who can't hit well, and that teams in the AL who can afford to hire the premium veterans therefore do better than those who can't afford them.