stumbling virtue

The Harder They Fall

 
Mickey Mantle at his best, 1951.

I'm a lifelong Yankee fan. No, I didn't just jump on the bandwagon when they started winning World Series again in the 1990s, and I'm not a "follow the winner type" (my favorite NBA team is the woebegone Nets. Sigh.). It actually began when I was maybe seven or eight years old. I had gotten the distinct impression that my grandfather didn't like me. I can  understand why--he had had two daughters, and then his oldest daughter (my mother) had three daughters, with me being number three, the last in a long line of disappointments. I think he was exasperated and annoyed by the fact that he couldn't get the much yearned for boy in his family. To top it off, I was neither pretty nor charming, not the kind of girl who could make a cranky old man forget that he thought he should have had a son or grandson. I thought, though, that if I tried to be interested in things he was interested in, he would be less gruff and critical. When he came over to our house during the summer he would turn on the TV and watch the Yankees game. I sat with him and he did not teach me about the game, nor did he steep me in Yankees lore, or tell me anecdotes about his own visits to the stadium (I never found out if he actually saw a game in person or not, but I suspect he did, because my mom's now 90 year old cousin has told me about going to Yankee games in the 1930s and '40s). He mostly yelled at the screen when someone got thrown out while stealing, popped out, or struck out. I realized after a while that I was wasting time with him and instead devoted all my time to my grandmother, who taught me how to play poker and whist, and was all around wonderful. She liked to watch old movies on TV that she remembered seeing in the theater, and I liked watching them with her. It couldn't have been easy being married to my grandfather, who mostly expected a wife to wait on him (he was apparently spoiled rotten by his mother and sisters), but my dad always said that the one thing in life that really made her happy was her grandchildren. I'm glad I was able to help a little bit. But though I gave up on my grandfather, I didn't give up on baseball.

(I know, too much about me.)

All this leads me to Jane Leavy, who was a baseball crazed little girl growing up in New York in the 1950s, whose beloved grandmother aided and abetted her Yankee addiction, which was much worse than mine, and included a huge crush on the big star of the period, Mickey Mantle. She became a sportswriter, and got the chance to meet her idol, which was not...well, not the way I'm sure she dreamed of it when she was a little girl and a big fan. He was rude and crude to start with, then drunk, and ended the event by hitting on her and passing out. Aren't you glad now that you never met your childhood hero (or if you did, I hope it went a little better)?

Leavy includes this story in her new book about Mantle: The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. I'd read her earlier book on Sandy Koufax, so my expectations for this book were high. They were met.

Majority Whip

 

I knew it was coming, and I agree with the decision--a .638 winning percentage is a pretty nice thing to walk away with. Nonetheless, I will sorely miss the always blunt and entertaining #35. Alack.

(I know, too much 14th century theater for me. Alas.)

Goodbye and good luck.

And Then We Came to the End

FantasyLand

I signed up for two fantasy football leagues this year. In honor of my current European history project, I have named one team The Schmalkaldic League and the other The Defenestration of Prague. Neither roster looks very impressive, I might add. Oh well. Here's to the waiver wire.

I'd like to thank the good Lord for making me a Yankee (though maybe not today)

Okay, I've said before that I don't think I should write too much about sports here. There are already many, many newspapers, networks, radio stations, blogs, and barroom chatter doing a fine job. I recognize that no one needs my contributions.

But please be patient for a moment, because the events of the past few days must be discussed.

I guess I'm still somewhere between shocked and crushed at the embarrassing Yankee flameout. Shocked because this team had seemed different from the other failures of the past few years. They played hard, they were resourceful, and most unexpectedly, seemed to be having fun together. It was hard not to think that this year was going to be special.

It wasn't, though. I mean the Red Sox loss in 2004 was awful. But at least they competed in every game. Even in Game 7 there were rays of hope. This series, though, just died a lackluster death. What was it, 20-something scoreless innings? Okay, you can say that some of the Tigers pitched the games of their lives; that's fine, if you're an ordinary hitting team. But this lineup was supposed to be a latter-day Murderers' Row. You'd expect them to at least get a few hits, even against someone's best effort. Yet somehow it didn't happen.

Right now there's a lot of blame being handed around, and just about everyone deserves some (hooray, at last a true team effort). Everyone has a favorite player, though, and everyone wants to protect their favorite. So I'll do that now for mine.

Mike Mussina. Yes, he should have held the 3-1 lead in Game 2. I can't argue that. But the burden of that loss shouldn't fall too heavily on him. To wit:

• Before they got that lead, a small army had already been left on base (I guess the signs of the dwindling of the super power offense were already showing, though we didn't know it yet). That 3-1 lead should really have been something like a 5-1 lead. 
• Giving up 4 runs in seven innings isn't great. It's certainly not the type of dominant pitching performance that you'd like to see in the postseason. However, it's not awful either, especially if the offense is supposed to be the strong suit of the team. And it's not like he blew up in the second inning and left the bullpen to try to salvage the rest of the game.
• Down 4-3 in the seventh should not devastate a good team, especially one with a superstar offense. I mean, this was not the type of team that should wilt at the prospect of being behind by one run. If there's anyone out there who says they saw them fall behind by one run in the seventh and thought, "oh no, how can they possibly ever catch up?" well, I don't believe you.
• Again, 4 runs in seven innings isn't great, but it's not the kiss of death for a team. Should my boy get some of the blame? Absolutely. But look at what the rest of the team did. There were players batting in the .100s and .200s in this series. Compare that to 4 runs in seven innings. Which hurt the team more?

So it's over, and changes will be made. People will come and go. My Favorite Pitcher might even be gone. I don't know what the future holds for this team. And I know most people don't care. I know I care more than I should. I know for every one of me who does stupidly care, there are 80-some people who are gloating over this debacle. Go ahead, enjoy yourselves.

The hard part is the finality of it all, especially everything being gone so suddenly. And every year I say the same thing, when the Yankees exit the playoffs, you know summer is really over, and winter is coming, long, cold, gray, wet and windy, winter. Spring seems so very far away and when it comes I will be older and I will wonder where the time has gone. I will wish for spring and summer and a new season and new hope to come quickly during those hard winter days, but I know I can't wish for them to come too fast because their arrival will just mean more days off my own calendar.

But I'll try not to think of that now. I don't care for nostalgia, I don't like to wallow in the past, even the recent past. However, for today, maybe just one day, I can think back to a time just a few weeks ago when there seemed to be so much hope, and it still felt like summer with signs ahead of a happy October filled with crackling cool mornings and days of bright burnt leaves and blue skies and nights with games that seemed important enough to make everything else weighed down by trouble a little less heavy. Instead it's gone, and goodbye 2006, and goodbye names and faces that were familiar and almost like friends on the TV and the morning papers. It's gone, it's over, and I don't know what lies ahead.

My Fantasy...

...football team, that is. What did you think?

This year I named my team "Albertine Lives."

In week 1, I am matched up against a team named "Buttmunch."

I am combing through Proust to find appropriate quotes for trash talking.

College Football rah rah rah

I found this quote about college football in Big Trouble (see "I've been reading" in Books).

In 1906, the university [Northwestern] stunned its alumni and rooters by withdrawing from intercollegiate football. In part this decision--following similar moves by Columbia, Stanford, and California--reflected an outcry against the game's "professionalization." Scholars decried the "undignified chase among the colleges after men of muscle," the schooling of "powerful animals."

Chasing after players solely because of their athletic skill? The implication that some are not attending school for academics? Ah, one hundred years and things haven't changed much. Go team.

On Baseball

I haven't wanted to say too much about Yankees-Red Sox because way too much has already been said by far too many people. However, I will add this: If you were on the fence about baseball, or if you had never watched baseball before and were trying it out for the first time, or if you were trying to introduce a kid to baseball, the first three games of this series should have effectively destroyed any enthusiasm or interest anyone might have had. The games were awful. Just unbelievably horrible to watch, a true test of anyone's patience. And for all you people out there who say that Americans need to have a lot of offense to maintain their interest in any sport and "we can't have 2-1 games," well, I hope you're happy because you got what you wanted, 4.5 hours of batting practice per game. Yeah, that was a thrill.

(And I should note, my chosen team won the games and I'm still appalled.)

Anyway, tonight's game is the one that interests me the most. I'm hoping for a Yankee win, but do have this somewhat perverse desire to see A-Rod make an error, because if he does I think Mike Mussina may well just kill him right there on the spot. Now that's entertainment.