Why I Like Baseball

In this age of digital photography, I really should have been documenting this better. But at the time, I really did not know that it would have Pennant Race Implications. I’m talking about my hair.

A lady does not reveal her age, but a female ballplayer does. It’s no secret that I’m forty, is it? Well, this spring I wanted to spruce up my hair a little. Over the past 20 years it has had blond streaks, blue stripes, braids, perms, you name it. But it’s been a couple of years since I did anything new, and I was walking down the hair color aisle of my local drug store, and there was a very enticing-looking bottle for making Extreme Red streaks.

I admit, at the time, I did not think of the implications of the color RED. I just thought it would look nice.

At left you will see what it looked like on that first day, which was May 9th.

Now, as you may recall, that day, the Red Sox were in first place. The Yankees were at 16-16, not great but not horrible. Both teams had just gone 7-3 over their last ten games, and the Yankees at that time stood six games back.

So, I dyed my hair red.

Over the next ten games, the Yankees went 3-7 and dropped to 10.5 games back.

Over the ten games after that, bringing us to May 29th, the Yankees went 3-7 again, and dropped to 14.5 games back.

Now, for those of you who have used this kind of hair color before, you know it starts to wash out. It’s really brilliant for about three weeks. Then it looks pretty good for a good while after that, but after about three to four months, you know what it does?

It fades.

Today is September 21st. The Yankees are 1.5 games back of the Sox, who have just lost 5 of their last 6 including getting swept by the Blue Jays, and here’s what my hair color looks like now. Yeah, the actual red is gone. The ginger that’s left is what my hair looks like when you bleach it.

I don’t think I really need to add much more commentary here, do I. Except to say I am contemplating doing the streaks blue next.

I had dinner last night at Dominick’s on Arthur Avenue, a Bronx Italian-food institution where there is no menu, they only take cash, and there’s an hour wait for a table for dinner on Saturday night.

While you wait, they send you upstairs to a bar-equipped waiting room where the television is, of course, showing the Yankees if they are playing.

Last night as we climbed the steps up to the waiting room, Doug Mientkiewicz was on the ground being examined by Gene Monahan, the Yankees’ team trainer, and the lead had slipped away. In the time it had taken us to walk from the car to the restaurant, the score had gone from 6-5 Yanks to 7-6 Sox.

“What the hell happened?” I asked a guy sitting at the bar, but he was A) Clearly not from New York as he seemed taken aback to have a stranger talk to him. (Get used to it, buddy.) and B) Not a Yankee fan, as he hadn’t the foggiest idea.

So I asked the bartender instead. “Got his bell rung,” he answered. The game was on Fox TV, so I knew we’d see the reply of what happened many times over, so I stood at the TV, rapt. Soon there was a small crowd standing there with me. All the waiters from downstairs, and some of the cooks, had drifted up one at a time to see what had happened.

They were wondering, I’m sure, not only what happened to Dougie Mientkiewicz, but what happened to their season? For that matter, what happened to Derek Jeter?

“He hit the home run, you know,” one of them told me.

“There’s the captain. There he is,” said another as a shot of Jeter appeared on the screen.

“Yeah, but, it was him threw that ball away. Cost them the game right there,” the bartender said.

As if on cue, a replay of the double-play ball to short ran on the screen. Jeter stepped on second, whipped his body around… the throw was low. Mike Lowell was a freight train.

“Terrible, just terrible.”

“Who was pitching?”

“Proctor.”

“Him, I like him. Good kid.”

“He’s the one hit that guy last night!”

“Just protecting our boys. I like him. Good kid.”

“There’s the captain.”

And so it, went, a running commentary more musical and relevant than the blather Tim McCarver puts on. Jeter made another error, letting in another run. A ball dropped in front of Melky–a sac fly.

“Where’s Bernie? Bernie plays shallow. Bernie makes that play.”

The intercom from downstairs buzzed. “Table 33, table 33. Is Proctor still pitching?”

The bartender answered no. Bruney was in by then. “Who else we got out there?”

“Mariano.”

“You’re not bringing him in with them losing. That’s crazy.”:

“I think there’s still Luis Vizcaino,” I put in.

“Myers,” one of them answered.

And indeed, Myers was coming into the game. He even brought the inning to a close.

“Thank God.”

“That’s it. They’re not catching up.”

“Too much. What they gonna do?”

“Game’s over.”

The game was, indeed, over. Vizcaino did come in, to a chorus of negative comments from the staff, and let up another run. It was 10-6 and the Yankees were down to their last out when our table number was called. We trooped dutifully down to our seats and had a wonderful meal. I had the best veal piccatta I’ve had in years–possibly ever–and stuffed artichokes to die for.

As we were leaving the restaurant, I said good night to our waiter. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “Tomorrow, the Yankees are gonna win.”

That put a smile on my face. This losing business is new to us. We’ve had a winning team–a division winning team, in fact–for over a decade. The pleasure that comes in riding the horse in front, or even a horse in the pack and not trailing 13 lengths behind, is not there for us this year.

But the pleasure of following a team and of sharing that experience with others is still there.

“We’ll get ‘em tomorrow,” I said, and stepped out into a warm Bronx night.

Well, I tried my best. Joe Torre always says that game three of a five-game series is the pivotal one, so I broke out the heavy artillery tonight.

First, we switched bars, heading off to the Sports Depot in Allston to watch the game. The Sports Depot used to be a train station, and it’s this huge place with a vaulted roof and dozens of huge plasma TVs. We’ve never been too badly harassed there for being Yankees fans, and they have a decent menu, too.

Second, I wore the as-yet-untested New York Black Yankees flannel reproduction jersey, size 3XXXL, in honor of the Big Unit. Yeah, it looks like a dress on me, but it’s warm, which makes it especially good for October baseball.

Third, I wore the blue and white hair stick in my bun. Not the black one, not the silver one, and certainly not he red one. The blue and white one I bought specifically to match my Yankee gear.

Fourth, I broke out the bears. Several years ago I won a Derek Jeter “Bamm-Beano” bear at the Jersey shore. (in August 2000, to be exact) and the Jeter bear has come with us to watch many playoff games. This little beanbag fella stands (well, sits) about 8″ tall, has pinstripes and a #2 and “’98 Champs” stitched on his chest. He has accompanied me to watch several playoff games before at various bars and homes over the years.

I also have a Roger Clemens, a Roger Maris, and some other bears. But on my recent trip to Cooperstown I found a bin of the Bamm-Beanos on sale for two bucks a pop, and pulled a Tino Martinez and a Scott Brosius out of the pile. All three–Tino, Brosius and Jeter–came along to the bar tonight.

To no avail. For the second game in a row the Yankees offense was utterly stymied by great pitching.

Why, oh why? did this have to be the night that Kenny Rogers finally figured out how to pitch in the postseason? Prior to tonight, in 9 postseason starts, Rogers hadn’t recorded a win. Some of you might remember how he was with the Yankees in October 1996. Or how he walked in the run that ended the Mets’ season in ’99.

I had a feeling of foreboding as we approached the bar a few minutes before game time, though. Why? There on the chalkboard by the door were written the fateful words: “10 PM TONIGHT: KARAOKE.”

Yes, my friends, it seems we could not win. Despite the fact that Randy Johnson pitched decently and was hurt by several lucky hits in the third inning, despite the fact that the Yankees just could not get any decent breaks, I knew then beyond the shadow of a doubt that the late innings were going to be painful.

We ordered dessert in the seventh inning in a last ditch attempt to turn things around. My boyfriend and I often have what I call PFM when it comes to the Yankees: “positive food mojo.” This means that if I’m hungry, and the hot dog guy at the Stadium comes just before the Yankees bat, then they’ll rally. Our Double Fudge Delight was delivered just as the Yankees batted in the eighth, but all it got us was that Jeter walked when he should have been struck out looking (at least according to ESPN’s K-Zone).

By then, the karaoke had begun. As Ron Villone was pitching, with two men in scoring position and two out, the hapless drunkard at the microphone was wailing out the song “Don’t Let Me Down.”

By far the most appropriate song though, came next, as the tuneless boyfriend of the karaoke nite organizer got up to intone the Rolling Stones’ classic: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

No indeed.

–

P.S. Will someone tell me what was up with the guy in the crowd holding up the sign that read “Billy Crystal Sucks”?? My only guess is that he used the old Tiger Stadium–just before it was demolished–as a stand-in for Yankee Stadium to film the movie “61*” but I’m thinking that might be a stretch?

P.P.S. I’m out of ideas for what to try. Anyone with any good luck charms, pre-game rituals, etc. I implore you, don’t forget them tomorrow.

There we were, at the bar, drinks in hand, scorecards ready, the HD TV splashing our faces with color, watching those dreaded words scrolling across the bottom of the screen: “Weather Delay.”

We passed the time playing Hangman and eating chicken wings. It will not surprise you to hear that the first word corwin attempted to stump me with was “grand slam.” I nearly got him with “mound ball,” and he eventually did trick me with “knuckle curve.” I had him almost hung with the word “championship,” and I think I would have finally gotten him on the next round when the game was called due to rain.

Our walk home from the bar takes us past our local video store, so we rented The Benchwarmers, since our hunger for baseball was so cruelly aroused, but not satisfied. corwin, as it turns out, had no idea what the movie was about, only that it had some vague baseball connection.

I loved it. We got to see Reggie Jackson in action (sort of), and in the fine tradition of the Bad News Bears, the nerds face up to the jocks on the baseball field.

But it’s not the same as ALDS Game 2, now, is it? My brother was at the game tonight, with our friend Ken, with the two tickets we were stingily awarded with our partial season ticket plan. The two of them plan to play hooky from work tomorrow, as the game has been rescheduled for 1pm. Ken joked on the phone that he and Julian were merely going to stay over in the Bronx. Not.

Ah well. In twelve hours, the wait will be over, and perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise. I never did have time today to wash my lucky Mike Mussina jersey. (Yes, I wore it slightly grungy to the bar…) Now maybe I’ll have a shot at running it through!

Some years ago, my parents relocated from the New York area to Tampa, as those over 65 are wont to do. Fortunately for my Yankee-loving family, the move allows them to see plenty of their Yankees every spring, as well as several times a year at Tropicana Field. Last September, in fact, I flew to Florida for one particular Yankees’ series which happened to coincide with my father’s 70th birthday (My mom and I threw him a surprise birthday party in a luxury suite, and the Yankees also scored like 20 runs in the first two innings. It was a great party.). This September, though, my parents came the other direction, visiting friends and family throughout New Jersey and Massachusetts with an eye toward driving to Cooperstown.

My mother actually grew up about fifteen miles from Cooperstown, in a small town called Laurens. She had visited the Hall of Fame as a kid, and had come once with my younger brother around 1990. But even though I’ve been to Cooperstown twice, I’d never made it inside the museum, and my dad had never been at all. So they picked me up in Boston on a Wednesday afternoon and we headed for upstate New York.

We arrived around 6 pm, to a cheery lakeside resort called Belvedere Lake, which meant we had just enough time to settle into our two-bedroom cabin and then get back in the car for the 12 mile trip to Cooperstown. I knew from previous visits to the village that if we walked into the Doubleday CafŽ on Main Street at 7 o’clock, there would be food and a television showing the Yankee game.

Actually, all three TVs were showing ESPN when we walked in, but the staff cheerfully changed one to YES, and we sat down to enjoy the game and eat. We had absolutely delicious fresh whole trout, with extremely sweet fresh corn on the cob. Even Cory Lidle’s crummy first inning couldn’t ruin a meal like that, and the fact that he then got his act together and pitched well, and the Yankees hit well, and then Brian Bruney and Scott Proctor… yeah, oh, and did I mention they were playing the Devil Rays again? They won. We ate an absolutely delicious walnut pie (it’s like pecan pie, only with walnuts), and sat at the bar sipping tea, and enjoying the Yankees beating the Devil Rays. I don’t even remember the final score. (My father says it was 8-4, but I have no way to check. I’m typing this in the cabin right now, which has no Internet or phone. Even my cell phone doesn’t work here.)

In the morning we intended to get up early and hit the museum first thing. But it is so quiet and peaceful on Belvedere Lake, and it was so gloomy with rain, that even my pathologically early-rising mother slept until 9:30 in the morning. We finally hit the road about an hour later, and succeeded in tuning in Fox Sports Radio, though the scoreboard report I heard mysteriously omitted the results of the Red Sox game. We ended up returning to the Doubleday CafŽ at five minutes before 11am, just in time to get breakfast. We watched ESPN while we ate, awwed in sympathy over Francisco Liriano (done for the season with his elbow tweak), mused about Derek Jeter’s hitting streak (now at 22 games, though he’s still a scoche behind Joe Mauer in the batting race), and watched the previous night’s highlights. Somehow, though, we missed the results of the Boston-Baltimore game again.

We then spent the next five hours at the Hall of Fame. They sell a combination ticket, that includes the Hall of Fame and the other two museums in Cooperstown, the Farmer’s Museum and the James Fenimore Cooper Museum. Thank goodness we didn’t buy it–we never would have had time to see the other places, and as it was, we could have spent longer at the Hall of Fame except we were tired and hungry.

Describing many of the pieces in the Hall of Fame as “memorabilia” is like describing New York City as a municipality. I am not impressed easily. I’ve seen a lot of the historic places of baseball, and a lot of autographed jerseys and game-used balls and things. But nothing compares to artifacts like the actual ball that Jack Chesbro threw wildly in 1904, in the second to last game of the season, to throw away the pennant.

If you don’t know this story, it’s one of the first and best Yankees-Red Sox stories. (Or worst, depending on how you look at it.) Of course, back then, they were the Boston Americans and the New York Highlanders, but the rivalry had already started. In 1904, Chesbro had an unbelievable year, the likes which will never been seen in modern baseball. He pitched two or three times a week–started 51 games, appeared in 4 others, and finished with a 41-12 record. He pitched 48 complete games that year, racking up a total of 454 2/3 innings. Think of Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Sandy Koufax–Chesbro is the only one of them in the Hall of Fame who had a season like that.

But on the season’s final day, the Bostons played a doubleheader in New York, and needed to win only one of the two games to clinch the pennant. In the bottom of the eighth, with the score tied at 2-2. and the go-ahead run for Boston perched on third and two out, Chesbro threw a spitball so wide of the plate that newspaper accounts differed on whether it was high, low, wide, or what–it was so far away from where it should have been that the run scored easily. The Yankees were unable to muster an answer, and the pennant belonged to Boston.

There it was, in a glass case, it’s bi-colored stitches precise and vivid against the ball’s parchment-colored skin. The ball that Chesbro threw. The cursed ball, that his wife lobbied be changed from a wild pitch to a passed ball to the end of her days. It looked so innocuous there, and yet, that was the ball that had eluded the eyes of the press writers and the glove of Red Kleinow that hit the backstop and allowed Lou Criger to score from third. I felt as though I were looking at a bullet from the Kennedy assassination.

There is, of course, lots of stuff for Yankees fans at the museum. I was interested to see that there was a brisk and lively crowd at the museum and in Cooperstown today. It’s mid-September, you’d think that tourist season would be over, yet business on Main Street seemed busy and we had to look for a parking space. In the museum, I could not help but notice the preponderance of NY logos on customers, but then again, we ARE in New York state.

Babe Ruth gets his own room. There were several display cases of all Yankee artifacts, but only Ruth rated his own display room, with a video documentary, and lots of objects.

I was quite tickled and pleased to see the large section on Women In Baseball, and of course the fact that a “jersey” (actually a T-shirt) from the Pawtucket Slaterettes, the all female-baseball league I play in, is included in the artifacts! I don’t remember the text of the display exactly, but it did note that the Slaterettes are the oldest all-girl’s league in the USA.

Probably the other display that really knocked my socks off was the huge case that showed all the World Series rings in it. Man, the one that the Marlins made in 2003 is so huge, it dwarfs all the others in the case. Of all the Yankee ones we saw, my mother and I agree that the 1996 one is the most tasteful.

I never realized that the actual bronze plaques for the HOF inductees were as small as they are. I guess I figured they were the same size as the ones in Monument Park in Yankee Stadium, but they are actually much smaller than that. The hall where they are now displayed is bright and cathedral-like with a high ceiling and natural light. My mother noticed that the only guy who is wearing glasses in his bronze reproduction is Reggie Jackson.

After a quick stop in Augur’s Bookstore, we had lunch at 4pm in the bar at the T____ Inn. Really, it was dinner, which they started serving at four, and we got to watch Mike & the Mad Dog on YES while we ate. Did I mention that this is a really Yankee-obsessed family? We caught their check-in with Joe Torre, who informed us that he was pushing Chien-Ming Wang’s start to tomorrow because of the rain, and also shuffling the lineup.

We also learned that the magic number was 7. In other words, Baltimore must have beat Boston the night before. We did the math. That meant that if we won tonight, and then beat Boston the next three games, we could clinch. I have tickets to both games on Saturday, and if they clinched on Saturday night, that would just be too cool.

We then took a scenic drive to Laurens to see the house where my mother grew up and other landmarks from her childhood, and then it was back to–where else?–the Doubleday CafŽ, for our third meal there in 24 hours, to watch the Yankees and Devil Rays again.

Jeff Karstens seemed a bit out of sorts on the mound, but really he pitched well if you don’t count Rocco Baldelli’s two homers and a triple. Meanwhile, the fill-ins like Kevin Thompson really came through, and though the Yankees were down 4-1 when the rain was pouring hardest, they came back to tie it, and then thanks to great relief pitching by Darrell Rasner, who held them to four runs, and a clutch hit by A-rod, the Yankees won it 7-4. We heard the final few outs in the car on our way back to Belvedere Lake, as well as the news that Boston had lost again to the Orioles.

The magic number is now at 5, and oh, I would so love it if the Yankees would win the next three in a row against Boston to clinch while I am at the Stadium. But really, I’ve just had three solid days of excellent baseball indulgence, so perhaps that’s too much to ask for. But that won’t stop me from hoping.

–

P.S. In a strange aside, I spoke to corwin tonight as the game was ending. He went into one of our favorite Chinese restaurants in Boston with a friend, and they gave him my lost black-on-black Yankee hat! The one that I decided was a jinx, since the night I lost it was the night before the five game sweep of Boston? Yeah, that one. Now I’m conflicted as to whether I can wear it again or not. I think I had best retire that one. It occurs to me that the place to buy a new hat was probably Cooperstown but… oh well. Perhaps we’ll do a little shopping tomorrow before we leave the area.

P.P.S. Update as of mid-day Saturday. Last night’s game was rained out, and they lost the afternoon contest. It’s the hat. I’m sure of it. If they lose the nightcap, I may have to burn it when I get home.