In which a man raised on Phil Rizzuto and righteous hatred of Boston confronts the unthinkable: his best material is 48 years old.
—I grew up in Sag Harbor, New York, the son of a Yankee fan unlike any other, which is to say exactly like every other. My father knew every player, every game, every pitcher’s windup, every box score dating back to an era when men wore wool uniforms in August and considered it bracing. I heard Phil Rizzuto’s voice more than I heard the voices of actual family members. “Holy cow!” was not an exclamation in our house. It was liturgy. It was our Sunday catechism, delivered with the reverence other families reserved for grace before meals.
—A Word About the Enemy
—Every great civilization defines itself against a mortal rival. Athens had Sparta. Rome had Carthage. The United States had the Soviet Union. Poland has Russia, and if you want to understand how Poland feels about Russia, ask a Yankee fan of my generation about the Boston Red Sox and then stand back at a safe distance, which does not exist.
—This is what diplomats call an “intractable conflict,” meaning a conflict where both sides would rather chew broken glass than concede a single point, and honestly the glass sounds refreshing. Everything Red Sox was horrible, starting with Carl Yastrzemski, a man whose sideburns alone constituted an act of aggression. Later came Pedro Martinez, who threw at hitters’ heads as a form of personal expression and once body-slammed a 72-year-old man onto the Fenway lawn, which in Boston is considered a warm greeting. I was not taught to dislike these people. I was taught to understand them, the way one understands a hurricane, from inside a reinforced structure, praying.
—October 2, 1978: A Holy Day of Obligation
—And then there was Bucky Dent, the light-hitting shortstop who lofted a fly ball over the Green Monster in the 1978 playoff game and single-handedly caused an entire region of the country to require therapy. Boston responded by giving Bucky a permanent middle name that cannot be printed in a family newspaper, or frankly in most non-family newspapers. In our house, October 2 was observed like a religious festival. Candles were not technically lit, but they were lit spiritually.
—The Sicario
—I grew up with Mickey Rivers loping around center field like a man who had misplaced his car keys but was in no particular hurry to find them, and later I was given Mariano Rivera, the greatest closer who ever lived. Mariano did not “pitch.” Mariano entered the game like a sicario walking into a diner. The jukebox stopped. Grown professional athletes looked at one cutter, breaking in on their hands like a subpoena, and began mentally booking tee times. He was the Rafael Nadal of the ninth inning: one weapon, everybody knew it was coming, and nobody on Earth could do anything about it. When Mo came in, the game was not “likely over.” The game had already happened. Everyone was just filling out paperwork.
—Fabled by the Daughters of Memory
—Here is my problem, and it is a serious one, medically speaking. All of these memories are becoming ancient. They are calcifying into legend, like Homer’s Odyssey, soon to be chanted by blind poets at Panathenaic festivals: Sing, Muse, of the pinstriped man of many turns. I tell young people about Bucky Dent and they look at me the way you’d look at a man describing the Peloponnesian War from personal experience. My glory is being fabled by the daughters of memory, and the daughters of memory, frankly, are starting to embellish.
—The Taunting Gap
—Meanwhile, Red Sox fans now come at me armed with actual data. “Winningest team of the century,” they announce, referring to their four championships since 2004, and the horrifying part is that this is true, which violates everything I was raised to believe about Boston and truth occupying the same sentence.
—So I dig deep. I reach back into their childhoods and unearth horrific memories: 1918 to 2004, an 86-year drought during which the Yankees won 26 titles, several apparently just to be rude. The problem is that my material has a 2004 expiration date, and it is 2026, and my comeback inventory is aging like a boat left on a trailer behind a gas station. I am one bad argument away from telling a 30-year-old Sox fan about Babe Ruth, at which point he is legally permitted to help me across the street.
—Meanwhile, in the Front Office
—Which brings me to the current administration. Brian Cashman has been general manager of the New York Yankees since 1998, back when people were worried their computers would explode at midnight. He inherited a dynasty built by other men, rode it to glory, and has delivered exactly one championship since, in 2009. That was seventeen years ago. Children born that night are now driving. Some of them are driving to Red Sox games, out of spite.
—His contract is finally up after this season, and I am assured the organization is thinking very seriously about thinking about it. His manager, meanwhile, was recently extended through 2027 on the strength of a resume that reads: made the playoffs almost every year, won the World Series never. In the modern Yankee organization this is called “stability.” In any organization George Steinbrenner ran, it was called “cleaning out your desk by noon.”
—George Would Like a Word
—Let us remember the sacred Steinbrenner ethos: you win, or you are fired. Possibly both, in the same week. George changed managers roughly 20 times in his first two decades, firing Billy Martin five times and hiring him five times, an arrangement scientists now recognize as baseball’s first renewable energy source. He fired Yogi Berra 16 games into a season and did not even do it himself; he dispatched an emissary, the way medieval kings sent ravens, and Yogi refused to set foot in Yankee Stadium for the next 14 years. He publicly branded Dave Winfield “Mr. May,” which by Steinbrenner standards was practically a valentine. He apologized to the entire City of New York for losing a World Series. Losing the World Series. During that same Series, by his own account, he got into a fistfight with two Dodgers fans in a hotel elevator and emerged victorious with a cast on his hand and zero witnesses, which remains the most Yankee injury ever recorded. He was thrown out of baseball twice, once over illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon, and returned both times measurably angrier. The man banned beards. He would have banned second place, but the league office wouldn’t let him.
—Today, losing a Division Series earns you a supportive press conference and a thoughtful discussion of “process.” George did not have a process. George had a volcano, and the volcano had a shipping company.
—The Current Standings, Which I Am Legally Required to Report
—As of this writing, your New York Yankees — payroll roughly the GDP of a coastal nation — sit in second place in the American League East behind the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that spent last season playing in a spring training park and spends money the way retirees spend it at the early-bird special, which is to say carefully, and with coupons. Behind us, breathing directly onto our necks with chowder breath: Boston. If the season ends with the Rays winning the division on a payroll smaller than our infield’s, and the Red Sox celebrating anything at all, I want to state for the record that I will be fine, in the sense that Pompeii was fine.
—The Compass Is in the Blender
—And here, forgive me, is where I get philosophical, because we live, whatever your politics, in the most Trumpian of Trumpian times. Yeats had it wrong for our particular moment. It is not that the center cannot hold. It is that the compass itself — moral, judicial, financial, take your pick — is no longer fixed to anything at all. It simply gets thrown around wherever it needs to go that day. One day we are fighting Iran. The next day the President is hawking artificial intelligence like a rotisserie gadget and putting up a triumphal arch. An arch! The needle spins, the universe wobbles, and the ratings have never been better.
—Well. I have arrived at a conclusion that disturbs even me: the New York Yankees need a little of that crazy energy. Not the policies. The attitude. We need winners. We need ratings. We need an organization with zero excuses and zero options other than winning, where winning is not a goal or a hope or a “process” but the foundational, philosophical, load-bearing operating principle of the entire enterprise, the way it was when George walked the earth and every employee in the Bronx kept an updated resume in the glove compartment.
—Plato in Pinstripes
—Plato taught that we sit chained in a cave, watching shadows flicker on the wall, mistaking reflections for reality. That is the modern Yankee organization: a reflection of a reflection of 1998, projected nightly at premium ticket prices. And it cannot be the reflection anymore. It has to be the original image, the source, the thing itself that casts the shadow. Because in Plato’s world there is a highest idea, the form behind all forms, the pure light behind everything that exists, and I am prepared to argue, in a peer-reviewed philosophy journal if necessary, that this form is the interlocking NY, crowning the top of all sporting achievement, throwing the very shadows in which lesser franchises are condemned to live, such as Boston.
—Please make it happen, New York. Please make it happen, so we can stop this wobbling universe and get the compass pointing somewhere again. I’m already breathing easier just thinking about it.
—I Coulda Been a Contender
—Is it too late? Is it over for good? I don’t want to be that guy — the one endlessly reliving his college years, cornering strangers at weddings to explain what October 1998 felt like.
—Perhaps it ended when ownership tore down the House That Ruth Built — a shrine of victory, a cathedral of memories, a coliseum so feared that opposing teams developed facial tics just reading their schedules. All of it turned to rubble and replaced by a new stadium that resembles less a ballpark than a mid-priced cruise ship, the kind with a lazy river and an $18 turkey leg. The Legends, meanwhile, were put out to pasture at Legends Field, which sounds majestic but looks more like the corner of a Disney exhibit where they store the animatronic presidents that stopped working.
—Do something, Yankees. Win something. Fire someone, hire him back, then fire him again — the old ways, the beautiful ways. And do it soon, before the last of us who heard Rizzuto live are ourselves fabled by the daughters of memory, and some future bard chants our story to a bored and fidgeting crowd: And lo, they waited. And waited. And their waiting was long.
—And beneath the chant, if you listen closely, one last voice — fading slowly, softly, into eternity:
—Holy cow… did you see that…
