About a week ago, I spent a few days struggling with the suspicion that I was spiritually polluted. It was something David Brooks wrote that got me started.
As I’m sure you recall, two weeks ago on this page my esteemed colleague published a characteristically elegant and funny essay in which he made bold to predict the outcome of this year’s all-Gotham World Series. The Series, he explained, would be decided not by skillful play but through the functioning of an absolute moral imperative.
On the one hand, you had the New York Mets, “exuberant boys somehow touched by grace” who delight their “innocent” fans by bravely wielding mere ballpark “pixie dust” against opposing teams full of faceless, free-agent Goliaths. And on the other hand, you had . . . well, the ur-Goliaths themselves, the two-time defending champion New York Yankees, auction-purchased superstars whose fans are power-loving gorillas with “gold chains” and “back hair.” Surely, friend Brooks announced, this primitive tribe is not to be granted a third-straight October excuse to gloat and swagger. Surely, instead, God has created baseball in His image and the Mets must therefore win.
Which result would have been okay with me, or so I imagined before the Series began. New York baseball is an ancient but highly abstracted loyalty in my family. We Tells, that is to say, have long been in the habit of pulling for both the Yankees and the Mets at the same time. And we have grown accustomed to having this double affection rewarded. In the 31 years preceding the 2000 season, our favored teams collected 10 league championships and 7 World Series victories — each of which I remember with unmodulated pleasure.
Three weeks ago, as the Yankees and Mets wrapped up pennants numbers 11 and 12 simultaneously, I figured I had it made. I figured a Subway Series meant I was sure to witness my eighth New York world title. And I figured this one would come at no risk to my nerves and self-respect. Never once would I frighten my children by shrieking at the television set when something went wrong. Never would I wish illness or injury on the “other” team’s stars. For there would be no “other” team, really, and so nothing could go wrong. I would be a model of emotional equipoise and good sportsmanship during every at-bat of every inning. And at the end of the Series, come what may, I would still be able to bask in the winner’s glow.
This was my plan, anyway. But it fell apart five minutes into game one at Yankee Stadium, when a lifetime of carefully maintained New York base-ball agnosticism suddenly deserted me and I found myself transformed into a rabid home-team partisan. Suddenly I cared very much that the incumbent Yankees should win. And I prayed the upstart Mets would lose. I hated them, even.
I told my children that Mets batters reminded me of nearsighted fat kids I knew in Little League. During game two, I told my children that Mets catcher Mike Piazza intended for his broken bat to spin toward the pitcher’s mound at Roger Clemens and knock him unconscious. I told my children that Clemens should have thrown the bat back at Piazza — and that it was too bad he’d missed. At one point during game three, when a crowd reaction shot briefly filled our TV screen, I told my children that all 55,000 people in Shea Stadium that night were relatives of a man named Joey Buttafuoco. Then I told them who Joey Buttafuoco is. In considerable detail.
And finally, when game five was finished and a Yankees three-peat safely secured, I gloated. For hours.
Why? This is the question that briefly plagued me last week. Had my gloating revealed me to be the kind of Yankees-booster goon David Brooks described in his essay — a man of bad character?
I did not want to believe it. So first I had my wife check my back for hair growth; there was none, thank heavens. Then I set about constructing ex post facto rationalizations for abandoning family tradition and choosing one New York ballclub over the other. The Yankees are aesthetically superior, I told myself, old-fashioned baseball formalists who call their manager “Mr. Torre.” The Mets, by contrast, are sports vulgarity personified. Shea favorite Mike Piazza, to take but one of many possible examples I’ve considered, dates a Peruvian bimbo who posed nude in Playboy — with her own twin sister! So what if family man Roger Clemens, no doubt offended by Piazza’s infantile conception of eros, threw a baseball bat at him? Honor demanded it.
Such arguments as these have helped me recover confidence in my own integrity, and I hope they will prove a comfort to Yankees fans everywhere. Failing that, of course, they are always free to gloat some more. That works, too, I find.
DAVID TELL
