Matthew Engel in the city going crazy over a game of baseball
If you wander around the cheapo art shops on Seventh or Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, you can probably still find a framed print of the famous old New Yorker cover which plays tricks with perspective to depict the world as seen from the middle of the city. The foreground is taken up entirely with the avenues and skyscrapers of New York. Then, vanishing towards the horizon, the rest of the United States is there as a small hinterland, with Asia just a distant sliver. Never has that been more accurate than it is right now. The World Series, America’s baseball classic, is on. But this year it is nothing to do with most of America: the Yankees are playing the other New York team, the Mets. Imagine, if you can, Manchester United vs City or Liverpool vs Everton not just in an FA Cup final, but playing for the League, the Cup and the Champions League in one dollop. Objectively, it is not even the planet’s biggest sporting event of the past month. Objectivity, however, is in short supply.
The city, always self-obsessed, has now entirely disappeared into its own universe. There are no conversations apart from baseball ones. The Dow Jones is gyrating crazily but hardly anyone’s noticing. Estimates for black-market ticket prices are all in four-figures, peaking at $5000 (about R40000). If the best-of-seven series goes the distance, it will pump about $200-million into the city economy. “It’s Christmas in October,” trilled a souvenir seller. Gore, Bush, Hillary, Arafat … excuse me, are they pitching today? New York has fantasised about this for 44 years: a Subway Series. Instead of flying across the continent to get from one venue to the other, you only have to take the 4 train from Yankee stadium, at 161st Street in the Bronx, change at Grand Central, then take the 7 and clatter out to Shea stadium on Long Island. Most spectators will drive, of course, but that’s America for you.
I sat in one crowded diner yesterday with a mom on one side explaining to her seven-year-old why it is called a Subway Series. And on the other side was Joanie Wolf from Queens, who remembered the old days: “A Subway Series was no big deal. We had one every year.” Major League baseball used to be concentrated in the big cities of the industrial east: California, for instance, did not get a look in. But that all changed in the Fifties. Until then, New York had three teams: the Yankees, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1956 the Yankees beat the Dodgers after winning the most famous World Series contest of all: Don Larsen’s perfect game. Larsen pitched throughout and not a single opposing batter got on base – a feat as fine and rare as 10 wickets in a Test-match innings (which Jim Laker had done a few weeks earlier). A year later came the bombshell. The owners of the Giants and Dodgers, acting in concert, secretly negotiated to move their teams to the increasingly crowded and wealthy west coast: the Giants to San Francisco, the Dodgers to Los Angeles. “I loved the Dodgers,” sighed Joanie. “When they left, I learned so much about money and politics and the way things worked.”
It is unfortunate for the reputations of the businessmen involved that about half the Fifties population of Brooklyn were growing up into writers (Philip Roth the most prominent), whose continuing bitterness about their team’s exit would remain forever second in their minds only to sexual angst. For four years, New York had just one team. Then, in 1962, the Mets were formed. Famously dreadful at first, they have since won two World Series themselves. That hardly compares with the Yankees, who are aiming for their 26th (out of the last 77) and the fourth in five years. Theoretically, the Mets are the lovable underdogs. In fact, they are almost as rich and crass as the widely loathed Yankees. When the Mets qualified for this series, dozens of fans queued all night to get tickets. Late next morning, a “suit” was sent out to tell them to get lost: phone sales with credit cards only. Seats for their home games, the club later announced, would be sold on Saturday – the Jewish sabbath, which ruled out New York’s large Orthodox population. But the upside of it all is that, in a tribal city, the sport is non-tribal. Mets vs Yankees has no racial or religious overtones. Because they are in different leagues, the teams never even played a competitive match until 1997, so any hatred is very shallow. There is a lingering sense that the Yankees are the rich guys’ team: in the 50s, some Giants stars played with neighbourhood kids in the street while Joe DiMaggio was playing with Marilyn Monroe.
But all that seems pretty old-hat. Some New Yorkers (such as the mayor, Rudi Giuliani) are deep-dyed Yankee fans; some love the Mets; many will pick their favourites the way they vote, swayed by last-minute whim and fancy. (Hillary Clinton, running for the Senate, seems to have chosen the Yankees after consultation with a focus group). “Civil war,” screamed one tabloid headline. But by British standards, it is a very civil civil war. The fans are after the right to make jokes to colleagues on the losing side at the office coffee percolator. They will sit together in the stadium and at home, and they will laugh together. Sure, there may be the odd pavement punch-up, but it will be fuelled by booze not hate. This is sport, dammit, and it’s wonderful. The real venom comes from outside New York. The economics of baseball are now such that teams from the smaller cities fear they can never compete with the big boys again. The Kansas City Royals, for instance, who were champions in 1985, these days get less overall revenue than the Yankees haul in from TV alone.
‘Many midwesterners see a Subway Series as another example of New York arrogance,” said Mike Fannin, sports editor of the Kansas City Star. The Royals have a new star batter, Johnny Damon, but expect him to want an $8-million salary when his contract expires, way beyond their reach. He could be a Yankee in 2001. Now, here is a situation that does sound like British sport. But money does not necessarily buy baseball happiness, insists Matt Romanoski, editor of Sports Week: “To a degree it’s true that it’s now harder for the smaller cities. But you’ve got teams like the Baltimore Orioles who pay as much as the Yankees and stink every year.” And for 15 years, between 1981 and 1996, the Yankees also failed to reach the World Series. The club became a national joke because owner George Steinbrenner spent his time second-guessing his managers and then, as a roughly annual event, firing them. If a pitcher had a bad day, Steinbrenner would race to the press and demand that he be traded. “He’s undergone the greatest transformation of anyone ever,” says Romanoski. “The spectre is still there. If they lose to the Mets, he’s going to go berserk. But he’s pretty much a revered guy now. He still gets in the manager’s face when they have a long losing streak. But he’s not so concerned with getting his name in print.” The baseball possibilities are terrific, for the poor devils looking on enviously from Kansas City as well as for New Yorkers. Even for people outside the US, who might not know the difference between a beanball and a beanie baby, this week has something important to say. If the World Series lives up to its promise and rivets a huge city without ever endangering its safety, dignity or good humour, shouldn’t all sports administrators be showing an interest to see how it can be done?