[One of the most vile acts of vandalism in this city’s history will occur some time next autumn, when the Kotel of American sports will physically cease to exist, replaced by a Disney-like simulacrum of the most hallowed place in baseball. When that happens, we can all relive the magic by reading Christopher Morris-Lent’s hour-by-hour breakdown of last night’s Yankees-Mariner’s game.]
5:10 PM, May 2, 2008
It’s a sacrament of sports fans everywhere, expat and otherwise, to root for their hometown teams in hostile stadiums, to rain insults down upon the hated home team while enduring the scornful opprobrium of their supporters. And what better opportunity to do this than a Yankees vs. Mariners game, pitting the most odious franchise in all of sports against the only team that the dilettante Seattle sports fan – i.e., me – cares about on a regular basis? Bearing this in mind, I ordered a pair of tickets up in the bleachers for each game in the series back in April and awaited the arrival of March with masochistic joy.
At around 5:10 my friend from Yale, much more of a hardcore fan than a detached, over-intellectualized humanities douchebag like me can ever be, came to campus, and with a Don Diego cigar in my mouth we walked to the 125th and Lexington subway station. Regrettably I got a little lost around 125th and St. Nick’s, so I used that as a flimsy pretext for leading my charge on a stroll down Harlem’s main street, puffing my cigar along the way.
We swapped obscure NBA references – Manute Bol, Robert Horry’s clutch shots – and I reflected with pleasure that it was good to talk about sports again after three months at Columbia, and that no outside observer could discern how little I really knew about the subject. To appear smarter than one actually is – this is the key to life.
5:40 PM
As we saunter under the Park Avenue overpass, the glow of gentrification getting ever dimmer, I cast my mostly-smoked Don Diego into a trash can in front of Dunkin’ Donuts. Freud tells us that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and yet, my internal gyroscope is awry, my stomach is reeling, and my feet stumbling as we enter the 4-5-6 station at 125th and Lex. For a few minutes the 4 fails to come, and deep breaths are unable to forestall the inevitable: distancing myself from the throng, I proceed to vomit the entirety of a Judge, deluxe, with curly fries into a garbage can. It was more delicious going down than coming up. To make another joke in, uh, bad taste, and, uh, acid wit, whatever brief flirtation I might have had with bulimia is quashed forever.
5:45 PM
Two more convulsions, the 4 arrives, and I’m pressed up against the doors for the entirety of the ride: it’s as crowded as the end of Watership Down. My cranium wobbling, I wipe the sweat off my clammy forehead and swallow my bile. Oh my paws and whiskers!
6:00 PM
The masses spill out of the station into the stadium. At our bleacher seats, I excuse myself to go get a drink of water. A trip to the bathroom follows, wherein I sit on the toilet but actually just barf all over the floor. The symbolism of tossing my cookies on Yankee Stadium is not lost on me. A gentleman with a mop and a broom opens my stall’s door before apologizing. “Looks like someone barfed in there,” he says. More than he’ll ever know.
6:20 PM
I blow $6.50 on a pretzel and a hot chocolate, the former of which is like ambrosia and the latter like some magical elixir. The sun is dimming against the magisterial upper deck, the stands are slowly filling up, and I’m beginning to feel that Rudy was right – this really is the most romantic spot in New York. Highlights of the Yankees’ former glory march across the DiamondVision.
No sport depends on nostalgia and tradition as much as baseball does; what else would justify all the artifice and languor? Joe DiMaggio, Reggie Jackson, Don Mattingly: part of a shared mythology. Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Carl Pavano: the current reality.
Now I wish to propose the following idea: there would be no honor in rooting for the Yankees these days if it weren’t for this mythology, for their bloated payroll ensures such a ludicrous advantage against pretty much ever other team that there would be no honor in winning and infinite shame in losing. It’s kind of like fighting a cripple on the playground. And yet, nobody has perfected the art of doing less with more than the Steinbrenner regime: going into the game, the Yankees are a pitiful 14-16. And still the Yankee faithful turn out in droves.
7:10 PM
The game begins. Chien-Ming Wang takes the mound. I was going to make some Korean jokes about how he should have stuck with speed skating and StarCraft, but it turns out that he is a) good and b) Taiwanese. The first M’s at-bat dies with a whimper.
7:15 PM
I randomly observe my friend from the Pratt Institute taking seats five rows below me and take sadistic pleasure in sending him coy texts before finally saying ‘hi.’ Sports fandom is all about sadistic pleasure.
7:25 PM
The Mariners commit a senseless error. This yields an unearned run. I start to prod the hanging chads from my All-Star ballots, casting five votes for Richie Sexson at first base. I feel like the Jews who voted for Pat Robertson in 2000.
8:00 PM
We’re down 3-0 after having committed four errors. Four errors! Like watching one of those horribly overmatched Little League World Series teams get butchered by some Cuban kid with a bristly moustache, a nasty fastball, and a falsified birth certificate. The nadir of the evening comes when Jason Giambi, his skill as shriveled as his scrotum, pops out behind home plate, our catcher drops it, our pitcher beans him, and he comes around to score.
“Fucking hell!” I yell, even though there are kids around; the innocent have already been debauched, so I figure it’s as harmless as showing Blood Diamond to a child soldier. Besides, Yankees games are not PC events. That’s what makes them so much fun compared to the family-friendly Asian-fusion atmospheric of my hometown ballpark.
Four errors, three innings, two hits, no runs, one team to unite them all: shades of Rudy’s campaign slogan, “four years, three wives, two estranged children, no chance, one man to unite them all.” I should have been his campaign manager.
8:30 PM
Our lineup – studded with such stars as Jeff Clement, not to be conflated with Roger Clemens, who seems to have cuckolded John Daly in spite of having a blazingly hot wife of his own; and Wladimir Balentien, the second-best “Vlad” in the league and the best who spells his name with a “W” – finally yields its first run, on a stolen base and a groundout. Moneyball says it’s almost never right to try to steal, but obviously not a single person in the stadium has read Moneyball.
A random guido spots my friend’s M’s cap and calls him a “faggot.” His insult, for being unimaginative, is all the more exhilarating. Stupid asshole! I feel like Meursault at the end of The Stranger:
“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”
9:00 PM
The game is slipping away. Chien-Ming surrenders another hit. “Nice pitch, you dumb asshole!” I yell. The little kids look back at me. “That’s right, I said asshole!” I yell to nobody in particular. They are still looking at me. I am a terrible person.
9:30 PM
One of their players notches a single. “When are they going to hit a home run?” says the kid. “When are they going to hit a home run?” From the age of five he already has a quintessential Yankees mentality. His team tacks on a couple of insurance runs, putting the score at 5-1. It’s almost comforting, because it means we would have lost even had we not made the errors.
10:00 PM
Mariano Rivera enters the game and promptly throws one up and in. “Is that the way they play in the Dominican Republic, pendejo?” I scream.
10:05 PM
Mariano Rivera exits the game. Yankees win.
10:20 PM
Back on the subway. The conductor announces that “this train will make all local stops” before trailing off aphasically. It does until 125th, then skips rather inconveniently all the way to 59th. The fates compensate by showing me a glimpse of that “Freddy Sez” dude who goes to all of the Columbia football games.
11:00 PM
Back on campus, looking to redeem the experience through rehashing it; as always, not so good at life, but good at the commentary.
-CHRISTOPHER MORRIS-LENT
Wow, you’re a true douchebag. I blame the admissions office.
Said Alumnus,
On May 3, 2008 at 10:18 pm: