Friday, March 29, 2024 -
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The baseball-hostility phase

I KNOW. I know. They are despised by all of us official non-New Yorkers. But I gotta tell ya, if you are in New York now, loyal fan or not, it is a total Yankees takeover. And while the baseball season is over for most of us, to live in the immersion of that extra, extended World Series time period is intoxicating.

The expression, “the city that never sleeps” has taken on a whole new meaning. People are walking around bleary eyed, practically crashing into walls, more than happy to forgo sleep at any cost so long as they can stay up watching the games of those pinstriped players.

Normally reasonable and productive people, upon the arrival of this season, are sucked into this world of madness with the conversation obsessively focusing on one, and only one, topic.

And there is lotsa tension. Lots! The fear, the insecurity and anxiety seeping into people’s words and behavior is striking.

Don’t get me wrong, average, arrogant New Yorkers have more than unshaken faith in their Yankee boys. Of course, they feel they already have victory in the bag, walking in and around the subways with their sense of Yankee exceptionalism and entitlement, sporting “27” t-shirts, with the certainty of a 27th World Series victory for the team.

If they don’t win, though, I hope everyone will be OK. I mean, these people take their baseball really seriously.

There are rituals about these things.

If the Yankees win, a friend of mine reads the newspaper the next day. If they lose, she cannot bear it, to the point that her daily reading of the newspaper falls by the wayside, succumbing to the pain of the Yankees loss.

Listen, the Colorado Rockies are the ones who have stolen my baseball heart. Trust me. But nowadays,  in New York, the air is charged with that autumnal baseball magic. I mean, after all, this year was the year of the records. Riviera with his saves, Jeter, changing the face of history and surpassing Lou Gehrig in hits. Records are made to be broken, but actually living to witness the moment of a new record   . . . pretty exciting. After hitting his 2,700th hit, when Jeter took off his helmet and waved it to the crowd . . . it was living baseball history!

BASEBALL is the ultimate social equalizer in a world often divided. It’s nice to be a part of that general spirit. My feelings and anxiety are not on the line, because as much as I am watching it and enjoying it, I ain’t a Yankees girl. I’m a Rockies, root for the home town, girl. But I will admit the collective adrenalin invading New York is infectious (even though it is a stab in the heart every time I see Matsui out there).

Let me tell you, I have seen new sides of people I thought I knew well, come World Series time. Normal people have turned crazy.

Personally, I knew I was in trouble two years ago when I used Rockies and beli ayin ha-ra in the same sentence.

I learned to tip toe around a person I thought was my most gracious and genteel friend, and not talk while the game is on, if I value our friendship and, more importantly, my life.

I learned to watch my words and expressed opinions about rivaling teams.

I never thought I would be appreciative for a friendship not reaching the baseball-hostility phase and, just being grateful, the friendship has endured! Sheesh . . . talk about stress!

Yeah. People will surprise you. There is this other, more serious friend, a towering, intellectual talmid chacham and doctoral student, pursuing his, what is it now, third Ivy League university degree? Something about the Yankees came up and I off handedly asked him a baseball question. He paused, then laughed it off and said, “I think this is the only thing I do in life without gravitas . . .”

The serious ones have turned light. The seemingly polite ones have turned mad. Baseball: it’s an inverted world!  

FOR me a lot of the fun of baseball is in the love of the game. Watching the arc of the ball leave the pitcher and glide through the air over the emerald green field, hitting the molded glove with that thud of a sound echoing “I’m just where I belong,” as the ball buries itself and is lost to the eye, now swathed by the folds of that firm, yet soft from time, brown leather glove of the catcher. It’s the roar of the crowd, the nail biting excitement, the workings of the teams and how they interact. The love of the game.

Those Yankees are not quite out of the woods just yet and — not to open old wounds —as I paraphrased Tennyson two years ago when the beloved Rockies lost the World Series, “better to have played and lost than never to have played at all.”

Of course, you play to win and all, but it is the playing of the game that is the real bottom line. Not that I am anticipating the Yankees to lose. But we’ll know how it all turned out by the end of the week.

OK. I admit. Maybe, just maybe, I’m a bit jealous. It’s not so easy being a Colorado girl in New York. To be perfectly honest, I’d be perfectly happy to be the one  expressing a bit of that New York pompousness right now, sporting a Rocktober ‘09 t-shirt.

Guess, there is always next year!



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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