In which a John Cougar Mellencamp
song plays.
As the ’96 season thankfully drew to close, one in which my Tigers would finish thirty-nine games behind the Yankees, I decided to catch one last game. I thought about asking Dad to join me, but figured that he would rather not go, with the team so bad. In the third inning, I sat enjoying the sights and smells of Tiger Stadium, including the JumboTron in left field. The cameraman panned the audience and stopped on this old guy . . . my dad, laughing away with two younger women at his side, neither of which was my mom, his bride of over fifty years. The camera stayed on Dad for what seemed like an eternity. They were having way too much fun! Recognizing that he was sitting in the season seats belonging to a family friend, I made my way over to his section—not sure of what I would find. What I found was Dad, who had been given six tickets, sitting next to two women whom he had met outside the stadium standing in line to buy tickets: He had given them his two extras. Sitting below him was Mom, not caught on camera. We laughed until we cried.
— TOM PIOTROWSKI, Ypsilanti, Michigan
CERTAIN CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES, EITHER BECAUSE OF GEOGRAPHY, history, or demographics, are safely ensconced as Baseball Cities. It’s part of the local fabric; it’s ingrained in the people, in the urban planning, in the overarching psyche.
St. Louis, obviously, is one of these places. When I was living in St. Louis in 1998, logging those box scores and agate text until 2 A.M. at the Sporting News, the Arizona Cardinals—the team I have halfheartedly cheered for during those cold, angry months when there’s no baseball—happened to be playing the St. Louis Rams at what was then the TWA Dome. The date was September 27. Both teams were 1–2 at the time, and they were both traditionally wretched. The Dome was far from full, and it was quiet and antiseptic. Domes that host bad teams are the loneliest edifices you will find.
I was ecstatic to be there, though: Growing up in Mattoon, I’d cheered for the then St. Louis Cardinals and didn’t abandon them when they abandoned me for Arizona. Through years of misery, and absolutely zero playoff appearances, this was the first time I’d ever seen them play in person. St. Louisans who didn’t stick with the team had more vitriol toward the football Cardinals—thanks to bumbling, tone-deaf owner Bill Bidwill—than they had love for the Rams . . . but all told, they had little of either. And today, they really weren’t paying close attention.
See, that day, September 27, 1998, happened to be the last day of the St. Louis Cardinals’ baseball season, just down the street at the old Busch Stadium. 1998 was no normal year for the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans: This was the Mark McGwire year. McGwire entered the game with sixty-eight home runs, just two more than Cubs rival Sammy Sosa, and their back-and-forth chase had captivated the nation and set St. Louis ablaze. Mark McGwire could have said, “You know, I’d like to turn Laclede’s Landing into Caligula. From now on, everyone in the area must wear togas and have sex with the three people standing directly to their left,” and the mayor would have passed an ordinance within seconds. McGwire was king in 1998. Tickets to that game at Busch were golden tickets; they were the shroud of Turin.
Meanwhile, I was down the road at the TWA Dome, able to hear a couple of fans jeering the Arizona Cardinals’ coaching staff on the opposite side of the field. (This was before the Rams began pumping crowd noise over the loudspeakers. They do this.) The Rams-Cardinals game began at noon; first pitch of the Cardinals-Montreal Expos game (starting pitchers: Matt Morris and Mike Thurman) was at 1:15. The TWA Dome was not the cool place to be that day. There were far more noteworthy local occurrences than whether or not June Henley would lead the team in rushing yards that year. (He would, edging out the immortal Greg Hill.)
Former Illinois Fighting Illini running back Robert Holcombe scored a Rams touchdown in the first quarter, and the football Cardinals “struck back” with a Joe Nedney field goal, making the score 7–3. Then the Rams, in the second quarter, began to drive.
The Rams drove down the field, picking apart the Cardinals’ defense en route to what could have been an early decisive touchdown. It was fourth down and 1, at the Cardinals’ forty-yard line, and the Rams were going for it. They were trying to put their boot on the Cardinals’ throat early. (Football metaphors are always so much more violent than baseball metaphors.)
Rams quarterback Tony Banks barked out the signals, hoping to draw the Cardinals’ defensive line offside, and prepared to snap. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the TWA Dome exploded in a cacophony of noise. The place was silent . . . and then WHAM, the walls were shaking. A bomb had gone off in the Dome. It was as if someone pushed a button, and a tomb became the site of a rave.
Banks, never the calmest signal caller to begin with, freaked out: I think I saw his helmet lift up off his head and spin. He began looking around, bewildered, wondering if he’d missed something, if maybe his running back had suddenly broken into a pantless jig, if maybe a phantasm had risen from the thirty-yard line and begun dragging souls with him down to Hell. Banks pulled away from center, threw his hands up, and . . . then the whistle came. Delay of game. Five-yard penalty. No more going for it. The Rams punted. The Cardinals’ throat remained blissfully unstomped.
What had happened? Mark McGwire had hit his sixty-ninth homer.
It was off Expos rookie Mike Thurman, with two outs in the bottom of the third inning. The TWA Dome fans, watching their televisions in the luxury suites and listening to their Bartman pocket radios in the rafters, were keeping far closer tabs on McGwire than they were on Banks. When McGwire’s shot left Busch Stadium, they went crazy. The explosion caused Banks to lose his bearings and end up with the delay-of-game penalty. The Rams were forced to punt, and Cardinals ended up scoring fourteen straight points and securing the victory. It was a devastating loss for the Rams. The season ended up being the Cardinals’ first playoff appearance in sixteen years. I couldn’t have scripted it any better.
After the game, I ducked in a sports bar with a friend of mine just in time to watch McGwire hit his seventieth homer, off Carl Pavano. The place was filled with people who had just left the Rams game . . . and they were almost all wearing baseball Cardinals jerseys. And they were all cheering as if nothing bad had happened to them all day.
The baseball Cardinals and the Rams might as well play on different planets. St. Louis is a baseball town. Always has been, always will be.
THE CARDINALS clearly have their best scoring chance here in the top of the eighth, and with them still behind by only one run, one feels quietly optimistic about their hopes. It’s the 2–3–4 hitters, Ryan Ludwick, Albert Pujols, and Felipe Lopez, with Big Dog Troy Glaus still lurking down there if anyone reaches base.
Unfortunately, the Cubs have brought in Carlos Marmol. Cubs manager Lou Piniella has brought in the nasty right-hander as the setup man for Kerry Wood, a pitcher who’s far inferior to Marmol but is A True Cub. He once struck out twenty men in one glorious afternoon at Wrigley, still the best pitching performance I’ve ever seen. (And the stat folks agree with me: His Game Score, a simple sounding term that’s actually quite complicated, is one of the three highest of all time. And he gave up a hit.) Since then, Wood has been the throbbing, infected heart of Cubs fandom: all broken promises, all misplaced optimism, all woulda shoulda coulda. The Cubs wasted three, maybe four, good years of their prime in this decade waiting for Wood and Mark Prior to finally heal from their various Dusty Baker–induced maladies. It never happened. They ultimately gave up on Prior and installed Wood as the closer, under the concept of If He Pitches Less Maybe He’ll Hurt Less. He is a middling closer; Marmol’s a better pitcher. But the Cubs have invested too much now. They can’t let him go. Every time Kerry Wood is in the game, he’s a reminder of dreams that have long since died and been replaced by the inevitable compromises of life, perfection marred by harsh light and sad truth.
This is to say: I love it when Kerry Wood is in the game.
Carlos Marmol? Not so much. Marmol is all wicked slider and nasty fastball. His Achilles’ Heel, the reason the Cubs are even bothering with Wood in the first place, is that Marmol struggles with his control. I am not a professional baseball scout, and I only know what I’ve learned sitting on my arse hollering at the television screen. But it always amazes me that people who work in baseball proceed as if control—the actual process in which you throw the ball and have some idea where it’s going—is a minor issue, something that can be ironed out, smoothed, a tiny widow’s peak that just needs a dab of Botox. When a player doesn’t know where the ball is going, it doesn’t matter that he can throw it ninety-five miles per hour, or can horrify the gods with a ridiculous twelve-to-six curveball. If you cannot throw the ball where you want it to go, why are you pitching? Isn’t that the most important part? No one seems to side with me on this. Scouts treat control like a symptom rather than an inherent attribute. It makes no sense.
I’m trying to streamline this little rant into a thirty-five-second sound bite for Dad and Mike while trying to drink a beer, the last beer of the game, as Marmol warms up and Ludwick swings in the on-deck circle. It comes out something like “Marmol’s wild! Why do people not care about that? Wild is bad! Wild is thhh—[beer shoots out of my mouth as I work into a lather] Oh, shit, excuse me, sorry. Here, here’s a napkin. Anyway.”
Dad looks at Mike. “He’s starting to look a little nervous, ain’t he?” Dad is in the denial portion of mourning. He’s accepted that we might lose and is trying to curry favor with Mike so that when the Cubs win the division and commence their world domination, Mike will save Dad from the salt mines and allow him to live in one of the guest houses, simply feeding Ryne Sandberg grapes while I’m forced to carry hundred-pound bags of coal up the stairs to the penthouse of Lou Piniella’s luxury condo so that his furnace might have the heat necessary to run one of his fifteen Wiis. It is also possible that I’m a little delirious. It’s hotter today than I thought it would be.
“He looks like he knows this is about over,” Mike says, and his cockiness, his assurance, strikes me as creepy.
For three pitches, Carlos Marmol makes me look extremely smart, not that I’m saying anything anymore, lest I begin having visions of Nick Stavinoha rising above Wrigley Field like a dragon and engulfing the denizens of Harry Caray’s bar in the righteous flames of Hell. (How fast did I drink that last beer, anyway?) He begins the inning by throwing three consecutive balls to Ludwick. We couldn’t possibly ask for a better way to begin the top of the eighth inning than a leadoff walk to Ludwick with Pujols on deck. The rest of the Cardinals lineup is apt to swing at bad pitches from Marmol, to play right into his hands. Not Pujols. And with a runner on, Marmol won’t pick around the corners either, not with a one-run lead. We just need one more ball. This whole game is ours if we can just get Ludwick to take one more ball.
Marmol takes a slight walk off the mound and takes those deep heavy-cheeked breaths all people take when they remember that they have to breathe. Tim McCarver mentions that when batters have two strikes on them against Marmol, they are 14-for-190. Good thing we’re far from that. We only need one ball. Marmol hops on the rubber and does a little quick-pitch, a breaking ball (on 3–0?) that’s clearly inside. Ludwick, hardly a showboat, drops his bat and jogs to first base . . . and then he is called back. The pitch is called a strike. It’s a terrible call. We have gone from having our one ball to being one pitch closer to 14-for-190.
I jump up and just scream, surprising even myself. I’m a quiet baseball fan—I’m Bartman!—who mostly just sits and jots in his score book and mutters to himself and anyone unfortunate enough to be sitting next to him. But not here. I’m stunned by the call; I’m flabbergasted; I’m primed to kill whoever it takes to overcome this grievous injustice, to set the historical record straight. I’m standing up with my arms spread wide—beer in one hand, score book in the other; this will totally be my album cover, if I ever record an album—screaming as loud as I can “You’ve GOT to be KIDDING ME!” If you strain, you can actually hear me on the telecast.
The reason you can hear me on the telecast? I’m the only person yelling. In fact, everyone in my section, and as far as I know, everyone in the stadium, is looking at me like I just shrieked “Holy shit, you guys, BOOKS!” in the middle of a library. The game is irrelevant at this point. It is all prelude to a celebration. Am I the only one who saw this sin? This stain? This filth? This scalding of the great game? THAT WAS A BALL.
Dad, looking the way he does when my sister has a little too much to drink at dinner and starts getting lippy with the waiter, tugs on my Ankiel jersey sleeve.
“Easy there,” he says, soothing. “Sit down.”
“That was an unbelievable call,” I say. “We NEEDED that pitch. That wasn’t even close!”
“I know,” he says, still soothing, still defusing, cutting the blue wire. “Just sit down.”
I do. Two pitches later, Ludwick hits an easy loping fly ball to center field. Edmonds catches it, and there is one out. We do not have our runner. There are four outs to go. 14-for-191. Pujols walks to the batter’s box, once again the only man in red on the field.
CERTAIN TOWNS are just baseball towns, and having grown up near St. Louis, I can pick them out immediately. Some towns have baseball at their center, at their core. The Patriots won multiple Super Bowls, but that was an amusing, somewhat pleasant sideshow to the Red Sox’s two World Series wins, something to pay passing heed to when it’s cold outside. Detroit might be crumbling as an urban epicenter, but that whole town—and of course the suburbs every white person has fled to—unites behind the Tigers like they’re a talisman. San Francisco has a breathtaking stadium right on the water that attracts insular, pasty tech heads and homeless people alike. And yeah, if you’re going to force me to admit it: Chicago, Bears obsession and Michael Jordan diversion aside, has baseball in the blood as well.
In other cities, baseball is a leader in exile, dormant only temporarily, biding its time until it can rise again. Team mismanagement, weak finances, and inertia have forced the game to cede the stage for a while, but when the home teams recover, as they eventually must, it will become the center of public discourse as it has so many times before. Cincinnati. Kansas City. Pittsburgh. Baltimore. Those are baseball towns. They will rise again.
And then you have New York. The Giants and Jets will always take up a sliver of the public psyche, and the Knicks will always appeal to the intelligensia envious of players’ ability to stave off age and stomach weight. But this is a baseball town. This is the ultimate baseball town. The Mets, with their tortured history and colorful characters, have enough pathos and passion by themselves to take over a small planet. But the Yankees, the Yankees are the company team of a company town. They are Miller in Milwaukee, Skyline Chili in Cincinnati, General Motors in Detroit, Google in San Francisco, Warner Bros. in Los Angeles, Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Microsoft in Seattle, Coors in Denver. They are on the periphery of every conversation. Even if you don’t care about baseball, even if you’ve never sat through a whole game, even if you hate them and love the Mets (or the Red Sox, or the Cardinals), you always know how the Yankees are doing. They’re everywhere. In New York, the Yankees are smog.
When I moved to New York in January 2000, I became fascinated with the psychology of Yankees fans. They never seemed particularly concerned about losing. Like, it didn’t even occur to them that they might lose. This makes sense, considering 2000 was the team’s third consecutive World Championship, and fourth in five years. I attended the Yankees’ American League pennant–clinching Game 6 victory over the Mariners at Yankee Stadium, my first trip to the Bronx, and I was struck by just how unflustered the fans were by a 4–3 seventh-inning deficit. As you might have noticed, I get a little panicky when the Cardinals are behind in a game that’s ultimately meaningless to them. In a playoff game? I’m a disaster when they’re up by five.
The postseason is so maddening, anyway. The baseball playoffs are, by nature, random occurrences. In 2007, the Boston Red Sox, the team with the best record in the game, began the season at 2–3, playing Kansas City and Texas, two of the worst teams in baseball. In April, this was hardly worthy of note, even in Boston. But a 2–3 stretch in the playoffs would be considered an epic collapse. A postseason series loss does not mean that Boston is a bad team, or even worse than Anaheim. It will just mean they lost three out of five games. It happens all the time.
If you put the Washington Nationals in the playoffs, no matter how bad they are, they’d have a legitimate chance to win the World Series, because lots of goofiness can happen in three weeks, for no specific reason other than chance. This can be dispiriting to those obsessed with the notion that the postseason is supposed to reveal the mettle of a champion; we want our winners to be winners, not random victims of circumstance. That’s not how it works. Because of baseball’s fickle, micro nature, every postseason game is an upset, a statistical anomaly. This fits the game itself; statistically speaking, every single base hit is against the laws of probability. That the game’s ultimate prize is settled by a mad dash is in the spirit of the game we love, not against it. In the postseason, everything is bigger, and I’m not just saying that because we’re subjected to extreme close-ups of pitchers’ nose hair for a fortnight and a half. This expansion of importance only elevates the game. In the interminable regular season, instances of mental error and pressure-induced paralysis are forgotten and swept away by the daily tide.
In the postseason, though, it all matters desperately. It is as if the intense microscope of the playoffs expands the game to its natural size, the size it was all along. The playoffs require us to focus on each game’s small moments, the tidbits that slip past us the first six months of the season but obsess us now. A championship can be decided by the game’s greatest slugger stepping up on the biggest stage, or it can be decided by the tiny man who dinks a 0–2 slider in front of the charging left fielder who slips because it rained that afternoon. We have no idea and no control. We never do; October baseball reminds us of this, every night.
That’s how you’re supposed to respond to the playoffs, anyway. But not in New York. At that Mariners game, Yankees fans just smirked; their team was coming back, obviously. And they did: David Justice’s three-run homer in the seventh sparked a six-run rally, and not even an eighth-inning home run by an up-and-coming shortstop named Alex Rodriguez could bring the Mariners back. The fans around me treated the victory like an honors student who had aced a test. When you’re as smart as we are and you study up, of course you’re going to get an A.
That was, until 2009, the last time the Yankees won the World Series. Those nine years of “failure” didn’t do much to change the general mind-set. Yankees fans have to be the only fans left in sport who believe victories are some sort of birthright, a logical result rather than a pleasant happenstance result of talent, dedication, circumstance, and plain luck. If the Yankees don’t win, it’s not because the breaks didn’t fall their way, or because their opponents might have their own talent, dedication, circumstance, and luck; it’s because the Yankees failed. Part of me feels bad for Yankees fans. They can never experience that sublime joy of the underdog, the feeling that you are breaking through some unknown barrier and the elation at what might come next. One of the problems with the Yankees during the dog days of the mid aughts was that they always seemed confused that the other team refused to cede to the ghost of Mickey Mantle’s liver. Didn’t they know they were playing the Yankees?
Then they won the World Series in 2009, and all was normal in Gotham. The Yankees represent the civic character of New York, imperialism, exceptionalism, the idea that this is the only city on earth that matters, the old line that those people who don’t live in New York must just be kidding around. These days, after the economic collapse, terrorism, and rampant unemployment have taken their toll, New Yorkers are all gripped by a collective fear that the good times have come and gone, and might never come back. But the New York Yankees do not operate this way. The interlocking NY stands, perhaps alone, as the last symbol of New York’s self-evident, world-sanctioned superiority. The Yankees expect to be the best, period. It’s tough to find anything else left in New York that holds that kind of power.
So while the rest of us tighten our belts and brace for the worst, the Yankees open a state-of-the-art, $1.6 billion stadium. While the executives at AIG are held out as venal masters of destruction and shamed into giving up their bonuses, the Yankees spend $423.5 million on three players. While the housing market tanks and nobody will buy so much as a pair of socks unless they’re 75 percent off, the Yankees dish out two-and-a-half times more money in one off-season than the rest of the American League combined.
In Yankee Land, it is always 1927, and 1961, and 1998. It is not enough merely to win: The Yankees must dominate. That is the brand. If the Yankees aren’t world conquerors, lording their financial and cultural superiority over the penny-pinching peons that make up the rest of baseball, then who are they? That’s the New York way. It’s why I both love and hate it here. It’s why we all do.
MY FRIENDS here in New York all have ambitious travel traditions. Jesse spends a week every summer with his parents in Hawaii. Aileen goes to see distant relatives in Ireland. James and his kin go skiing in Aspen.
Me? Kansas City. Philadelphia. Houston. Growing up in Central Illinois, we never went to Disneyland. The Cardinals never played there.
When the Cardinals schedule came out when I was a kid, my dad would sit with a Magic Marker and circle one three-game road series. Then, come summer, my parents, sister, and I would pack into the Buick Skylark and schlep to the most storied destinations. Pittsburgh. Cincinnati. Milwaukee. Wherever the Cardinals were playing. (We’d take one road trip a season.) My mother and sister would drag us to some local curiosity during the day—the William Howard Taft Museum in Cincinnati is even duller than you’d think—and then Dad and I would drag them to the stadium at night. The deal worked out all right. Your childhood travel memories might involve staring up at the faces of Mount Rushmore or feeling the mist of Niagara Falls. Mine are in the upper deck of Riverfront Stadium, eating hot dogs while a tubby man wearing face paint screamed obscenities. Or Dad learning to hate Dave Parker in a Cincinnati hotel bar.
My parents come to visit me in New York City once a year: When the Cardinals are in town to play the Mets. I wouldn’t expect them to come any other time. A trip to Citi Field is an excuse for them to come out here. They don’t like New York, but they do like seeing their son. A three-game series with the Cardinals in town—that’s what secures them coming out here in the first place. They can handle baseball, and New York’s love of baseball is the one aspect of the city that spans the chasm between life in New York and life in Mattoon.
I live 878 miles from my parents. It’s a $300 flight, round trip, to St. Louis or Indianapolis (the closest airports to Mattoon), and because the terrorists ruined everything about travel, it takes roughly seven hours door-to-door. We all have our own lives, and it’s just hard. Family life is confusing as you grow older. Your parents understand your life less, and you theirs. My parents have friends and worries and hopes and troubles and daily mundane activities that I will never know or comprehend. I can’t explain to them my fears about my career, about my work, and they can’t explain to me whatever it is they’re going through on a daily basis. (I assume it mostly involves back pain and hot flashes.) The entry fee for a deep, meaningful conversation becomes steeper every year. It’s just hard.
So we have the Cardinals. They can always visit New York. I live very far away. But Citi Field is right there. And so is Busch Stadium. I can be there in seven hours. They are excuses to visit. They make us feel closer. Someday we won’t be able to do that. Someday I won’t be able to get there. But I can get there now.
CINCINNATI HAS taken a 3–2 lead on the Brewers, so the Cubs will need to win this game. Carlos Marmol has found his control. On a wicked 1–2 slider, he forces the great Pujols to pop out to the second baseman. Then Felipe Lopez grounds out to Derrek Lee at first base. Marmol is nasty. And he’s in absolute control. We’re three outs away. The crowd roars.
Dad says something I’ve been dreading he would say all day. “Well, looks like we picked a perfect day to get out here.”
He’s kidding, and he’s not. And no matter what happens: He’s here, and so am I. It is kind of perfect. We’re in a baseball town, after all.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE