Yankees Lose

I’m not sad to see the Yankees gazillion-dollar baseball team head for the showers though most of my neighbors are, another example of the irrationality that surrounds spectator sports. What those pampered millionaires have to do with the community spirit that makes you want to root for the home team is beyond me. But people think that because they play their home games in the Bronx, that makes them family, sort of like my feelings of kinship with people whose post office box numbers are similar to mine.

I actually enjoy the game of baseball because I once played it (badly), know the rules and can get caught up in the unfolding contest along with all the sub-narratives. But the last time I went to see a game at Yankee Stadium, owner Steinbrenner made us all stand up for the national anthem at the seventh-inning stretch, ‘to support our troops fighting for freedom in Iraq.’ I don’t see it quite that way, but freedom of opinion wasn’t one of the values on display that night on the diamond or up in the stands either.

There is always baseball down in Inwood Hill Park out my back door, and some of them are organized teams with uniforms and girlfriends sitting behind the chicken wire, plenty of illicit beer drinking and platoons of little kids running around one of the greenest corners of Manhattan adjacent to a nature preserve. If I knew any of the guys, I’d probably be moved to go see their moments of glory and disappointment. But the Yankees? Who dey?