The New York Giants Nostalgia Society was scheduled to meet last Thursday in the Bronx but the meeting was post-poned on the count of the World Serious. Bill Kent, the Grand Pooh Bah of the club, sent out the following:
Howdy, folks!
Due to circumstances beyond our control (the Yankees losing yesterday) we are changing the date of the meeting. I discussed it with the speaker, Allen Barra, and he will not be available in case of a prolonging of the series. Likewise some of the members.
So, we managed to switch the date to the following Thursday, Nov. 12th. Barra has agreed with this, likewise the church.
Sorry for this. Now we have another reason to hate the Yankees.
“I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can.” –Jay Z.
Well, not really, but nice try, Jigga. It’s not a bad line.
A few days ago, Emma wrote:
Empire State of Mind, as I said a few weeks ago, has a nice catchy hook but isn’t a great song, and far from Jay-Z’s best. Still, it’s neat that this postseason had such an obvious anthem – if only because now I’ll think of the 2009 Yankees every time I hear it, probably for the rest of my life. And I mean, say what you want about the tune, but the song that makes me think of the 2000 Yankees is “Who Let the Dogs Out,” so count your damn blessings.
I don’t listen to much new music these days so I missed this tune when it first came out. Then I caught a performance of it on TV right before the playoffs began. Can’t say that it moved me much, but I am a sucker for New York City love songs. Pop songs, or whatever. And I like Jay’s rhymes so it wasn’t offensive or anything.
Since then, of course, the song has literally become the anthem for the 2009 Yankees. Like it or not. Jocks and musicians have always loved hanging around each other, so it makes sense that Jay-Z would latch on to these Yankees. It’s all about branding, son, and Jay didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.
Jay loves the Yankees, he raps for the Yankees, he rides in their parade. And the Yanks love Jay in return.
So, for better or worse, we’ll never be able to listen to this song without thinking of the Yankees.
I’m in the new Sinatra, and since I made it here, I can make it anywhere.
Hearing that lyric while watching images of Alex Rodriguez’s heroics this off-season, and yeah, the song fits, man. The fact that it is a pop song makes it ideally suited for this kind of thing.
Emma was right, it’s an upgrade from “Who Let the Dogs Out.”
The Alex Rodriguez-is-a-choke-artist-storyline is dead. Smell you later, forever.
The headlock the Red Sox have had the Yankees in since 2004 is gone. The Sox had their best decade since WWI and still place second to the Yanks.
The Yanks won in their first season at the new Stadium. Nice segue. Not even a chance to dream up those “Curse of the New Stadium” stories. Fergit it. Next.
Pettitte, Posada, Rivera and Jeter: five times dope.
Mariano–one of the best. Ever.
The George Era is over, the Torre Era is over: congrats to Joe G, Cash Money, and the Steinbrenner Boys. I always said you wouldn’t want to be the guy to replace Torre–you’d want to be the guy to replace the guy who replaced Torre. But now Joe Girardi has a ring of his very own.
Here’s a few clips from the SNY Parade coverage. Dude, I went to make up. Never done that before. A woman airbrushed my face and told me to relax my eyes. That was pretty funny, I liked that. The rest was fun as well. It was a good time.
I’m going to be on SNY’s broadcast of the Parade. Not exactly sure how it will all go down, but some time between 11-1 I’ll be on TV, suit, tie, the whole schmeer. Check it out, if you can. Oh, and if anyone can Tivo it and burn me a copy, get at me, cause I don’t have a DVR dingus, if you can believe it.
Derek Jeter might be the biggest Yankee since Mickey Mantle if you take everything into consideration, but Mariano Rivera is on his own level, he’s from his own special place. He’s the Silver Surfer of baseball players–Intergalactically blessed. Able to stare down trouble and stay cool as a cucumber. It’s not just the results, of course, it’s the style. He is the most elegant baseball player I’ve ever seen.
Rivera’s career ERA in the regular season is 2.25, which of course is brilliant. But his postseason ERA — and we’re talking about 133 innings — is 0.74. And that’s not just an ERA fluke. While Rivera always does everything well, he does almost everything better in the postseason. Rivera’s strikeout rate actually is lower in the postseason, but he more than makes up for that with a lower walk rate.
But it’s the home runs that really tell the tale. In his regular-season career, Rivera has given up 0.5 home runs per nine innings, which, depending on where you set the innings cutoff, might be viewed as the all-time record. In the postseason, though? Rivera has allowed 0.14 home runs per nine innings — two home runs in 133 innings. There’s some luck there, of course. On the other hand, Rivera has done all of that against good (or great) teams, the vast majority of them with good (or great) lineups.
I don’t usually have lists of my top five favorite movies or books. But if I had to pick a favorite actor, it would probably be Gene Hackman. And if I had to pick a favorite athlete, it could easily be Mo.
This one is for Todd. Of course, the Yankees won it for themselves. We’re just fortunate to be along for the ride. But for us here at the Banter, this is for one of our own, Todd Drew, who was as rabid a Yankees fan as you are ever likely to meet. Todd passed away earlier this year, left this world far too soon. But he touched many lives and it was hard not to think of him as the season unfolded.
It is bittersweet that he’s not here in the flesh, but he sure is here in spirit. He’s part of the celebration.
The beauty part is that I’d be writing the same thing had the Yankees lost to the Phillies because for Todd, it was about the game. It was about showing up and rooting and staying until the final pitch, no matter the score, no matter the weather.
Todd was a true fan. He loved his team beyond the boxscore. He admired the craft of hitting, fielding, pitching, and managing. He was drawn to the personal stories in the locker room. He loved the numbers too. Beyond that, he relished how sport can connect a community, a city. That’s what he was about, and that’s what we’re about at Bronx Banter.
This morning, I received an e-mail from longtime reader Scott Smith, who is a Red Sox fan. He wrote about not knowing what to do with himself after the Red Sox won the Serious:
I was waiting for the other shoe that never dropped…How do you celebrate that? But then later I realized that I was carrying around this tiny warm ember that I could take out and wrap my hands around whenever I wanted. And that’s a nice thing to have, especially in a NYC winter…
For many of us here at the Banter, Todd is the warm ember that we can wrap our hands around whenever we want. Forever.
Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . nothing
—The Talking Heads
I just had to share this e-mail from longtime Banterite, Jon DeRosa:
On the night the Yankees lost the 2001 World Series, I was watching alone in my apartment on 90th St and 1st Ave, in a building that housed a “Checks Cashed” franchise in the ground floor. I couldn’t eat, though I made myself some Kraft Velveeta and Shells and poked at it. To this day, I can’t even think about Kraft Velveeta and Shells without tasting bile. For about an hour or two after the loss, I sat in stunned silence and absorbed the pain. My girlfriend (and now wife) is a pediatric oncology nurse and was working the night shift at the time so I was free to kick and scream a little bit – which I usually did anyway regardless of her whereabouts.
A comedian and former classmate Mike Birbiglia has a great joke about his tiny Manhattan apartment: he sees a mouse one night and asks, with pragmatic concern, “Where are you going to sleep?” This apartment was designed on those same specs, so even if I could summon the impetus, there was no place to move around and dispense the huge ocean of emotion that had collected in my guts. I went to the computer and began hammering out an email to all the Yankee fans in my distribution list. I don’t remember if I sat down with a theme in mind or if it just formed as I wrote, but what I came up with was not negative, was not bitter, was not even that sad.
I felt proud of a team running on fumes, pushing things to the brink. I felt loyalty to everyone, especially Mariano, whom we needed to be perfect, and for once, wasn’t. And I expressed my desire to see the same team back again next year, supremely confident they could become champions again. I wrote something like, “this won’t be the end or a period, merely a comma in a long line of championships.”
I never, ever, even once that night or in the following few years, considered they would not get that close again. I never thought about Mariano Rivera retiring or Derek Jeter declining. Inconceivable to me as I wrote, but since that night, Andy Pettitte went to the World Series – with ANOTHER team. I was so sure they would be back that the worst case scenario never occurred to me (and the worst case scenario always occurs to me, it’s in my genes): these young, core Yankees would never win a World Series together again. Cone was gone, O’Neill and Brosious were set to retire. Nobody even knew how old El Duque was. Tino was clearly going to be replaced by a big hitter – Giambi would have been signed right after the ALDS if it was allowed! But Bernie had time. Jeter, Mariano, Posada and Pettitte were young and had the majority of their careers left. They were the best; they were battle tested. They would be back and they would erase this awful feeling – it was not a matter of if, or even when, but how quickly? Mussina and Giambi and Soriano were not only superior players to the ones they had employed during the title years, but they were hungry and focused on winning their first ring – an infusion of new blood without disturbing the experienced spine of the team seemed like just the right approach.
Well, obviously, there is no need to re-hash the intervening years and catalogue the disappointments. On 2 or 3 separate occasions, the Yanks took the undisputed best team in baseball to the postseason and failed to return with a championship. In only one of those years did they advance as far as the World Series, and the ensuing 6 game defeat felt perhaps more like the end than that night in Arizona. They lost to such an inferior team in such an ordinary way. They would quickly (hastily?) allow Andy Pettitte to leave for Houston, and then before even a blink of an eye, Bernie diminished and retired and there were 3 left and they were fading too. Not in terms of talent and performance, but in terms of their position as THE stars at the center of the baseball universe.
After 2003, each year felt like opportunity lost and an approaching reaper edged ever closer. The worst case scenario that didn’t even take shape in my brain in 2001 was now hardening into reality. When they shut down Yankee Stadium last year, there wasn’t a parade. There wasn’t even one inning of baseball in October. How could that be anything but the definite and absolute end?
Yet, tonight, after 7 years of constant assault from the finally fully operational Boston Red Sox organization, half a roster of all stars and possible Hall of Famers come and gone, and the departing of the manager perhaps partially responsible and definitely present for the dynasty years, the Yankees have returned almost to where they were in 2001. They are not yet 3 outs away (and may not ever be, the pessimist gnawing on my brain stem reminds me), but they are 1 win away. They may be in a brand new home, but pitching tonight’s game is Andy Pettitte. He’ll be throwing the first pitch to Jorge Posada. Derek Jeter will be the first Yankee to bat, and I am hoping with every fiber of my being, Mariano Rivera will throw the last pitch.
I am not a fatalist. I don’t think the above circumstances give the Yankees any special advantage tonight or that they are destined to win in this fashion, and though likely, it’s possible that none of these 4 guys will even factor heavily in the outcome. But the fact that they could win this way, that they have improbably, at these advanced baseball ages of 35, 37, 38 and 39, formed the heart of yet another championship quality effort, is staggering me as I await tonight’s game.
I am going to watch tonight in my apartment, probably alone, though my wife might make it through 2 innings or so. My 2 sons will be asleep (or at least in bed) by the time the first pitch thrown. Like the Yankees, I live in a new place, a different part of town now, in a slightly bigger living room, with more roaming space and more things to break in frustration and anger – though I’ve acquired enough discipline to only attack the soft, silent couch cushions. But tonight I will be at peace (nervous, anxious, impossible for my wife to deal with, possibly immeasurably disappointed or elated, but at peace).
The Yankees have returned to the place I needed them to be. They have given themselves the chance to be world champions. I thought these 4 players would never be in this position again, and tonight, it’s largely up to them to determine their own fate. I aged along with the team. Thanks to my wife and sons, I have experienced higher highs than world series titles and thanks to life being what it is, I’ve experienced lower lows than blown game 7s or 3-0 leads, but with age comes the feeling that career paths, friendships, and relationships that were lost are never coming back. And that once that decay sets in, it forms an irreversible death spiral. But that doesn’t have to be true does it? Because here they are again – and it’s up to them.
I want it for them. I want it for me. I want it for them for me, if that makes any sense. But most of all, I want it for us as one collective thing, the group of players and fans that have been together from these guys’ debuts and who will be there to see their numbers retired. If we get beat, we get beat together, and that’s the only way to get beat. If we win, we win together, and that’s pretty frigging amazing.
We started this year talking about the new Yankee Stadium. How fitting then that the season ends in the new jernt. And what a way it’d be to break it in–with a championship. Two possible games left, Yanks need just one…more…win.
The anticipation is palpable.
I wish Todd Drew was here, but in some ways, he’s really never left. I think about him almost every game. And he’ll be front and center in my thoughts tonight as the Bombers go for it all.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned about Babe Ruth when you wrote that book?
“I think he was smarter than most people think he was. He grew up without much education. He came out of an orphanage. He had that reputation, and it was well-deserved of being a late-night guy, a carouser who ate a million hot dogs and all that stuff. But he was very smart in lining up his career. He had the first real business manager of any athlete. The guy took care of him and his money. Babe Ruth had money until he died and lived a good life. He made sound decisions in the people he enlisted to help him. He got a personal trainer back when nobody had personal trainers, when he was starting to fall apart. The personal trainer got him on the road and got him hitting again. He had the knowledge to straighten himself out. A lot of guys don’t have that — Antoine Walker being the latest one. He had more self control that I think most people give him credit for.”
The sun is shinning in New York. It is a beautiful autumn day.
Last night was a drag but it’s over and done with. Nothing to do but wait for tomorrow. Sure, there is plenty to worry about if you like to worry. But there is this too: the Yanks have two chances to win one game. I thought Robbie Cano had his best at bats of the Serious last night and I expect the offense to be a Bomb Squad tomorrow night.
