June 26, 2004

It is 10:23 pm and corwin is driving. I am sitting in the passenger seat, typing on our combination laptop and MP3 jukebox (it's an Apple titanium iBook). We are on our way back to Boston from New York and I will give you one guess why we were here. If you didn't guess "see the Yankees" then you are probably reading the wrong web magazine...

Today's trip to the Stadium was supposed to include a leisurely drive down last night, two hundred miles of happiness while listening to the game on the radio. Mother Nature had other plans, though, as intense rain wiped out not only the game, and the broadcast of same, but visibility for large swaths of Connecticut. Nothing like blind, white-knuckle driving, flashers on, following the dim red impression of the taillights ahead and the bare suggestion of lane markers just discernable in the dusk and through the morass of gray water. I could not even change lanes if I wanted to without running the risk of driving right off the road. I was calm as I did this because I am sanguine about things that are beyond my control like the weather, other drivers, and Fate. The danger was merely a potential, not an imminent threat, so we persevered until we drove through the rain band to a nice dinner at Rein's Deli on the other side.

Maybe Brad Halsey felt a little like that last night. The rain wiped out his second start with the New York Yankees, in which he was supposed to be the main player in the opening act of this year's Subway Series against the Mets. Last week he faced the Dodgers on national TV, and was good, so how would he be here at Yankee Stadium? I am sure he was trying not to allow adrenaline to get the better of him last night, as it appeared the rain might postpone opening night after all. It did, and Halsey instead threw the game today which started at 1 p,m. He was originally supposed to be caught by John Flaherty, but with a double header scheduled for tomorrow to make up for the rain out, instead he would see Jorge Posada behind the plate.

While Halsey was having his pre-game preparations all over again for the second time in two days, corwin and I were stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge. We had arrived last night at my brother's house in Leonia, gone to sleep and then gotten up this morning, with plans to go, the four of us (corwin and me, Julian and his wife Heather) to the game together. But Julian and Heather pooped out--they are in the process of buying a house, their first, and they needed to get certain papers notarized today, and felt they wouldn't be able to get what they needed done on a Sunday. So their Saturday was given over to life chores and corwin and I planned to sell their tickets in the parking lot. We figured for Mets/Yankees, tickets would be in demand.

Our original plan had been to go early enough to grab a slice of pizza at our favorite pizza joint two blocks from the Stadium, sell the tickets, and then see the game, but traffic was backed up on the Cross Bronx all the way across the bridge, so from the moment we got onto the highway to approach the GWB, a mere three minutes from Julian's house, we were in bumper to bumper. I put on WFAN and listened to Chris Russo, broadcasting live from Yankee Stadium, interview Flaherty. They talked about Halsey, Joe Torre, most of what you'd expect, until the interview was almost at its end. "So that at bat you had in the eleventh inning with the bases loaded in the World Series, that one where you popped up, did it bother you? Did it bother you all winter?" Russo asked, his rabid anti-Yankee tendencies well hidden until that moment when he just had to, HAD TO, rub it in. "Because," he said as if it were a fact, "if you had went up 3-1 in the Series, there's no way the Marlins win." Flaherty for his part admitted that, yeah, it did bother him all winter.

We crept across the bridge only to find Harlem River Drive remarkably clear, and the traffic to the MacCombs Dam Bridge fairly light. But then we were in bona fide game traffic, and it was almost one o'clock. The one advantage to being stuck in traffic just then was that the ceremonial parachute jumpers who came sailing down into the stadium were in a perfect spot for us to view them. Parachutes are cool.

I am not sure when it happened that corwin became the antsy one of the two of us about being in time for the first pitch and I became calmer and less hyper about it. But he was the one with ants in his pants in the car. I finally told him as the clock hit 1 p.m. to get out of the car and walk--I'd park, and try to unload the extra tickets after that. Off he went--with a 1:20 first pitch, he had plenty of time to make it to the seats.

A few minutes later I was parked in Lot 8, up on the roof in one of the last spaces left, and heading to the Stadium myself. If I had gone straight to the seats then, I probably could have made it just in time for the first pitch. But first I wandered around a bit trying to find some scalpers. There were none. I finally was stopped by one guy--I was holding two tickets conspicuously in my hand--who asked me if I was selling them. I said yes, I'd take twenty for the pair. He thought for a second and then said "Nah, I've made my money for today." The friend with him called him a lazy bum. I didn't see another one on my way to the Stadium, so I figured I should give up. They probably had all made their money and it would diminishing returns now.

I had one more errand to run before going to the seats, which was to drop off the four tickets for tomorrow's game at the Will Call window for our other friends who were coming to get them tomorrow. It is really too bad that the game is at 8pm, because if it had not been the ESPN game, and had been at 1pm, then corwin and I might have planned to go to it. But 8pm? We wouldn't get home until 4 or 5 a.m. What we had half-hoped the night before was that the rained out game might be made up as a double header TODAY, in which case we'd stay for both games. But no, they put both games Sunday. Ah well. And by then we had only packed one change of clothes.

Anyway, I stood in line at the ticket window inside the Stadium behind a bunch of people trying to trade in their tickets from last night's game for future games. I eventually made it up to the window just as the pregame ceremonies reached the point of introducing the first batter, only to be told that the Yankees have a policy against holding tickets at the Will Call window for future games--they'll only hold tickets for Day Of Game. Now as I recall in October, they had signs up saying they wouldn't even do that. But I suppose this is not the place to put in a rant about how badly season ticket holders are treated by the Yankees, not when I have something much more fun to complain about... namely, Al Leiter.

I was on my way upstairs when Kaz Matsui was making out, and Mike Piazza had just hit a double as I reached my section of the upper tier. But Halsey seemed to have things under control, as he struck out Cliff Floyd to end the inning. So here comes Al Leiter to the hill. Leiter is a little lefty, a former prospect for the Yankees who I feel bad for because he's had rotten luck in his career more than anything else, and I hear stories that his rise to stardom was at least partly derailed by one incident when he was a young Yankee pitcher when a manager refused to pull him from a game, and he pitched 170 pitches or something. As the story goes, his arm was never the same after that. That all happened when I was in my non-baseball period of my life and I have yet to read up on it myself. But that is the story I've absorbed through osmosis.

Leiter, now in the twilight of his career, has become much more of a change-up guy than he used to be. And with the rain out, he got an extra day of rest. The result was not good for the Yankees. The Yankees always struggle against slow stuff and junk. The momentum swung in the Mets' favor right there in the first, when Bernie led off with a walk, Jeter, whose 30th birthday it was, hit the ball hard up the middle, two men on and no outs. A-rod, you expect to be able to cash them in. But he hit a tapper on a bad swing, right back to Leiter, who took the out at first. Okay, one out, but men on second and third and Gary Sheffield coming up. You figure Sheff can cook up a fly ball or something to get at least one run in. But after going 2-0 on Sheffield, Leiter decided it was smarter to issue the intentional walk. He was right. With the bases loaded, Leiter went to a full count on Giambi, and then Giambi stared at called strike three.

May I pause here to say a word about Jason Giambi? That word is: "aaaaaaaugh!" (With apologies to the late Charles Schulz.) I can't help it, I love Giambi, but I loved him in Oakland, when he was a next-generation bash brother, when he stood out. Since coming to New York and submersing his personality under a milk and cookies exterior for the sake of "fitting in," he's been mostly a frustration for me as a fan. Oh, there have been moments, some great ones, but circumstances thus far have dictated that in that nebulous, unmeasurable realm of the fan's hearts, he is not perceived as a "clutch player." Too many moments like this one, where the opportunity to cash in is missed, and not enough like the grand-slam-in-the-rain and the two homers off Pedro in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. Do I think it is too late for Giambi to blossom into one of the great Yankees of all time? No, not at all. But he's not there yet. Until they win a World Series, with Gi contributing big, Tino Martinez is not forgotten. Now back to our regularly scheduled game.

The bases were still loaded, then, when Jorge Posada came to the plate. Now Jorge people generally feel more confident about when he comes to the plate than they do when Gi does. Statistically, numerically, they are not that different in a lot of ways, and yet... In this case though, all the confidence in the world didn't change the fact that Leiter did the same thing to Georgie as he did to A-rod, and got him to swing at some off speed slop, that was grounded weakly in front of the plate, 1-3, inning over.

From here the game gets easy to summarize. Whatever Halsey had in the first, he lost in the second, and the Mets scored two. Sheffield got the two back on a two run home run into the left field seats near the foul pole. Halsey then got it back briefly. But then he lost it again, and between he and Tanyon Sturtze, they gave up five runs--or was it six? Six runs--in the fourth inning. Matsui got one of those back on a laser shot that was so much fun to watch. We were sitting in the upper deck just to the third base side of home plate, so we watched this homer rise like a plane taking off in a straight line directly away from us and into the right field seats. Directly over a new orange advertisement hung on the right field wall, entirely in Japanese. I later read in the Daily News, which they were handing out free, outside the Stadium, that it is a billboard for the Yomiuri Newspapers, which corporation owns the Tokyo Giants, the team Hideki Matsui played for in Japan. Yomiuri's investment paid off with that one swing, probably, given the "Matsui vs. Matsui" angle on the Subway Series--Kaz. vs. Hideki, that is.

That was sort of it for excitement for the day. The crowd, even the Mets fans, seemed a tad disappointed that there was not much suspense in the game. Leiter, though he pitched deep into the game, was not having the kind of "dominating" performance that energizes a crowd. "It's amazing how often he goes 2-0 on a batter, and then ends up eventually getting him out," corwin said.

So while we waited to see if either Ronan Tynan's God Bless America, or a weak arm from the Mets bullpen, would give the Yankees new life, I looked around the ballpark and made notes on some things:

First note: The Out of Town Scoreboard is Back! Well, sort of. They put back 2/3 of it, with a "Daily News" billboard along the bottom of it. So now instead of three game scores at a time, it shows two. This is really not an improvement on the psychedelic loge scoreboards that now show game scores one at a time in glorious color. I suppose I should be grateful for at least the restoration of the 2/3 size scoreboard, though, especially since it brought us the news from Boston, Phillies up 2-0. Then up 2-1. Then a bit later, up 7-1. I guess the Phillies didn't much appreciate getting shut down by Pedro last night and unloaded on Bronson Arroyo. Poor kid.

A quick aside about Bronson Arroyo, and Jason Phillips, who caught Leiter today at the Stadium, while Piazza DH'd. The two of them were both at the induction ceremony for the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame this February. Phillips was actually there to accept the NL Rookie of the Year award, and Arroyo was there just as a guest, and as a representative of the current crop of Red Sox. There was a third youngster there, too... Rocco Baldelli, who was accepting the AL Rookie of the Year award. Now, Ted Williams, possibly the greatest Red Sock who ever lived, that is if you discount Babe Ruth as a Yankee... okay, let me say that another way. Ted Williams, perhaps the greatest star associated the most closely with the Red Sox, founded his own museum in Hernando, FL while he was still alive. The annual induction ceremonies attract all kinds of baseball dignitaries, and after the ceremony, the players sit down at tables in a tent for a mass autographing session.

Now, I don't know what this session was like when Ted was alive. But he's not around now, and the guys have a tendency to poop out after about a half and hour, even though there are still tons of people in line. Rocco Baldelli is from Pawtucket, RI and so is loved by a lot of Red Sox fans, even though he plays for the Devil Rays. He was one of the first to poop out of the autographing this past February. Arroyo hung in for quite a bit longer, but eventually he threw in the towel, too--I give him half-points for it then, when older players like Ryne Duren were also calling it quits. My dad and I had gone to this thing together, and he was just hoping somebody, ANYBODY, would still be there by the time we got up to the front of the line. Well, two guys were left. One was the indefatiguable Luis Tiant, who had just given a speech during the ceremony about how important the fans are, and the other was Jason Phillips, who signed for every last person in the line, and seemed still quite chipper and enthused about it. Maybe if Arroyo had gotten an award he would have had more staying power.

Anyway, ever since then, Baldelli has been on my s**t list, and I've thought Arroyo was likable, but very, very young, and I've thought Jason Phillips deserved to be a star. So, I feel a teensy bit bad that when Arroyo pitches well, the Red Sox don't score runs for him, and when he pitches crummy, they still don't score runs for him. Mind you, this is only a tiny bit of sympathy; he is a Red Sock, after all. Philips on the other hand, geez. A sac fly and an RBI in the second, and an RBI double in the fourth... I still like him, but c'mon, guy, give me a break....

Hmm, don't the Yankees know that when I drive two hundred miles to see them, they're supposed to win?

Second note: There are swallows living in Yankee Stadium! I saw one at 3:43 p.m. when Jorge Posada had a two-two count, and took ball three. There is no mistaking the tail of the swallow. They appear to be nesting in the catwalks on the roof. I wonder if the reason I never saw one before is because I had never before sat directly under the roof police. For Opening Day, long before September 11th, this is just standard operating procedure for big events in NY, they always position police with big binoculars on the roof. I've always assumed they also have rifles or something, but we couldn't actually see any. Anyway, perhaps they disturbed the swallows enough that they flew down around us in the tier seats. The swallows have nothing to do with baseball, by the way. I just felt like mentioning them.

Third note: Cracker Jack is Back! So, two of the changes I noted on Opening Day are undone, the Out of Town Scoreboard, and the replacement of Cracker Jack by Crunch And Munch. I'm sorry, Crunch and Munch, but Cracker Jack was immortalized in a song written in 1908, for goodness sake, and that is hard to compete against. I am of course talking about Jack Northrop's "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." I could not help but notice that during the seventh inning stretch singing of the song, the Cracker Jack logo zoomed back and forth on the loge level scoreboards. My surmise is that Cracker Jack insured their return to the Stadium by buying a sponsorship of the seventh inning stretch. Now, before any of you start going on about how advertising is ruining the game, may I point out that sponsorships and advertising have been a part of the game since its very earliest commercial roots? If ANYONE reading this is old enough to remember a time when radio announcers did not designate home runs as "Ballantine blasts" (a sponsorship they have brought back this year! How's that for history?), or similar sponsorships, then, heck, you must be really old--in fact you'd have to predate radio.

Fourth note: Bob Sheppard had the day off. The understudy who does the announcing when he is not there has identical intonation. But there is no way to get quite the same gravitas as Bob's voice, something that comes with age and experience.

Fifth note: speaking of age and experience, if anyone didn't know it was Derek Jeter's 30th birthday, the plethora of handmade placards and signs saying so would surely have reminded you. Between innings, the scoreboard camera managed to find a different one each time, and many hopefuls waved their signs in vain. There is not a lot to say about this other than, holy re-lighting candles, batman, Derek Jeter is thirty! Jeter arrived on the New York scene an instant superstar, instantly mature and a leader. In his very first game in 1996, he hit a home run and made a terrific catch, and he has never really slowed down since. Actually, maybe something has changed, and I do no know if it has come with age, or with the influence of Don Mattingly on his hitting, and on A-rod on his fielding, but this year, 2004, Derek Jeter is crushing the freakin' baseball, hitting long, long home runs to dead center and pulling the ball to left, and also has been stellar in the field. I will chalk it up to getting better with age, until I hear some other explanation. Happy Birthday, Derek.

Now, the Tan family has never left a baseball game early, at least not as far as I remember. We almost left a spring training game in Clearwater early last year, as the game was delayed by rain in the late innings and we had a plane to catch, but just as we were getting ready to leave, the game was called off anyway, so the streak remains alive. I think corwin probably put it best when he concluded that a) if you've paid to see nine innings, why leave after seven? And b) if there is going to be an exciting part of the game worth seeing, it's going to be the ninth, no? We were there in 2001 in a game where the Red Sox had a one run lead in the ninth, and David Justice hit a homer into the right field short porch to tie it. The next batter was Paul O'Neill, who had a swing very similar to Justice's. He hit an identical shot, and slammed the bat down thinking it was going to be a fly ball out, but no, it just cleared the wall also, Yankees win!

This time it was going to take a seven run outburst in the ninth for them to win it in regulation. They've scored seven runs in an inning a few times already this year. But although this team has had an inordinate share of come from behind wins (see previous entry...), the likelihood of it happening today shrank with each inning. The Mets bullpen turned out not to be so vulnerable. And so the Yankees lost, 9-3.

Sixth note: Liza Minelli.

After the game, we moseyed along the souvenir shops heading toward the pizza parlor, where we grabbed two slices and then made our way to the car. Not really what I'd call a perfect day at the Stadium, but it didn't rain, and Boston lost 9-2, so in our typical fan logic, we considered the overall outcome of the day positive, since we outscored them. Ah, well, you win some you lose some.

It is too bad we couldn't stay to see Jose Contreras get his first start since being reunited with his family, as his wife and two daughters defected by boat this past week. We would have, if not for the rain. But it is time to close the computer now, as it is my turn to drive the rest of the way through Connecticut....

Hello fans, here it is the next day and I am cleaning this up to go onto the web site. What a game Contreras pitched! Ten strikeouts! Two hits! No runs! And both would-be base stealers caught, one in a pitch out and one in a straight caught-stealing! He had everything working, and Flaherty and Mel and the infield were able to steady him in the two moments he needed it most. He struck out the side twice, once coming back to retire an important batter after Kenny Lofton made a Manny Ramirez-style play, trying to nonchalant an easy fly ball in center, which he then dropped, oops. His toughest inning came in one where he ended up walking three men, leaving him with bases loaded and two out, and a full count on Kaz Matsui with the choice of walking in a run and facing Mike Piazza, or getting him out. He got Matsui to fly to Matsui to end the threat. Contreras left the game with a cramp in his index finger in the seventh.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons Contreras could pitch so comfortably was that Jeter and Sheffield hit back to back home runs in the first inning, and then Jeter hit another one, a 420 foot shot to right center into the bleachers, off the first pitch of the third inning. After that Steve Trachsel for the Mets was dominating, but Trachsel was not the story, Contreras, the Cuban Missile, was. Paul Quantrill then came in and although he gave up a double to Mike Cameron, who then scored on two ground outs, there was really nothing to worry about. Tom Gordon came on to pitch the eighth, with the plan being Mo in the ninth, except that the Yankees then put the first three men on in the bottom of the inning, off Trachsel and a reliever, bringing Mike Stanton out of the pen to face Hideki Matsui. You know how Stanton always used to start guys off with that huge 12-6 curve ball? And we always said, man, if he doesn't use the fast ball for strike one once in a while, guys will sit on the curve? Well, Matsui probably didn't know any of that stuff, and you ccan throw it out the window anyway. Stanton decided NOT to throw the big bender on the first pitch. Instead, he threw a fast ball, and Matsui tagged it for a grand slam. Mo sat down, and Gordon pitched the ninth as well to earn the save (it was only 4-1 when he came in originally...), and the Yankees had sunk the Mets 8-1.

Only luck, Fate, weather, the forces of Nature, prevented that from being the game we saw. Ah well. Tonight it is off to Scliff's house to watch the game in High Definition Television. Moose tonight. And whether we win or lose, I'll have wished we were there.