SHAKING HANDS

Preface: Baseball, our self-defined but probably accurately national pastime came back to us last night albeit in a single game: the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox. Fittingly though it hurts to admit it, the Sox came back from what appeared to be a sure loss to win, 9-7, due in some part, perhaps, to it being opening day in venerable Fenway Park.

No other team played yesterday, a startling difference from the historic opening days that I remember as a young man: Cincinnati and Washington, DC. The Queen City fixture commemorating the birthplace of the major leagues and the capital city of the Republic, replete for the last hundred years (excepting when there was no team) with the President throwing out the first pitch. What would we have done without William Howard Taft?

Returning to the present-day, well almost present, I recalled an occasion somewhere between the Sox winning the American League Pennant in 2004 and their trying to win their first World Series in more or less four-score and something years. They would be playing the Cardinals and strangely I found myself rooting for Boston, ghosts of The Babe aside.

In 2004, I commemorated a personal historic happening with a missive, a writing based on something I do not believe I had ever done before, at least not knowingly. I shook hands and offered congratulations and good fortune against the St Louis team to a Red Sox fan. I was not struck down by bolts of lightning nor visited by specters more normally to be found in Iowa.

Boston did prevail and to show it was not a fluke did so again 3 years later.

It must also be admitted that my conversion could in large part be attributed to my living in St Petersburg where our local team, The Rays, compete each and every year in the same division as do the Yankees and Sox.

It seems fitting that I should post that missive here as once again the cycle of we call spring has, as happens every year, brought out cries of “Play Ball” throughout this wonderful land of ours.

SHAKING HANDS

I did something the other day that I have not knowingly done in my sixty-two years or at least since gaining what was then euphemistically referred to as the “age or reason”.

I shook hands with a Boston Red Sox fan and said congratulations!

The Red Sox fan in question, somewhat half my age, accepted my gesture graciously then looked me in the eye and questioned: “It hurts doesn’t it?” I acceded it did adding that it was comparable to the 1955 experience of losing to Brooklyn when Sandy Amoros made a catch off the bat of Yogi that even now seems impossible. My new found companion had no idea of the incident in question so we parted, he to watch and wait for the Series to begin and me to wonder how this had happened.

You see, I come from New York and the operative phrase is “come-from”. Like so many others coming from that landing place for immigrants, I have not lived there for forty years, distinctively since graduating from Fordham, a fine University and perhaps as important, situated only a few miles from the “Big Ballpark in the Bronx”, Yankee Stadium. My father first took me there from our home in Queens when I was six. The occasion was the lying in state of Babe Ruth. Babe was the raison d'être for the Stadium; the dynasty started with him; he is also according to many the reason the Red Sox have not won a World Series in what Lincoln would have calculated as four score and six years.

Recollections are clear. I remember the late 40’s and early 50’s and the improbability of Jerry Coleman’s triple and Phil Rizzuto’s suicide squeeze bunt; I remember we somehow always won. Reynolds and Raschi, Lopat and Ford; Henrich, Keller and DiMaggio I remember being in Nashville in the 70’s and taking the afternoon off for the playoff game, again to see the unpredictable, a homerun by Bucky Dent and another Boston defeat. New heroes: Reggie and Nettles, Catfish and Sparky.

Though it all the voice of Bob Sheppard resonating across the years:

“Welcome to Yankee Stadium!”

Even in the wilderness years when my Yankees were in second division wilderness, we always had the fallback of being a fan of not only the Yankees but of “any team playing Boston”. I knew that Jim Lomborg would not be able to defeat Bob Gibson; he didn’t. I remember living in London and seeing the CNN transmission of Bill Buckner’s boot and the Mets next day victory. I watched Carlton Fisk’s magnificent home run, knowing in my heart that surely the next day Cincinnati would rebound; they did. I remembered last year, getting the scores on the internet while living in Tanzania. Yankees Win!

So what happened this year? How could a Yankee team drop four straight games including the last two in the Bronx to a Boston team they had just embarrassed in Fenway? Looking back, perhaps I had a premonition on that final seventh game evening. I remembered that Brooklyn’s Archbishop Molloy had once asked for prayers for Gil Hodges, the Dodger icon who was batting poorly; He went 4 for 5 that day.

Surely God loves the Yankees as much or probably more since that cur O'Malley took the beloved Dodgers west of Philadelphia.

I implored the deity in our dinner prayers to wake up the Babe and Joe and Lou and Mickey (on his birthday) and give us another victory.

They always had; but this year they didn’t.

The Red Sox fan was right: it did hurt.

Yet I am incredulous that a part of me wants Boston to beat the Cardinals. Maybe it evolves from Grover Cleveland Alexander striking out “Push Um Up” Tony Lazzeri in the 20’s or the four straight against the Yankees in the 60’s. Maybe it is for Pesky and Doer; for Dominick and Teddy Ballgame and Yaz. Then again, maybe it is acceptance that even Babe feels enough punishment has been administered. I don't know maybe it is just time, time for their fans to experience what we have so many times.

When Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Perhaps the Yankee Stadium organist could learn the tune for next year’s opening day.

October 2004