NYY

We don’t have to like it, and most of us don’t. But the New York Yankees are the biggest dog in baseball and always have been. In fact they’re the biggest dog in all of professional sports. Exactly because of this, most of us automatically don’t like them. But there’s no denying it. Especially in October.

It’s not that they win the World Series every season. There are other competitive teams in the sport. They didn’t make it to the playoffs at all last year in fact, and much is being made this week of them not having been to the Series since 2009. But the Yankees have more titles than any other team in North American spectator sports and more than twice as many as the next baseball team. They had to build a new Stadium because they ran out of storage for their rusty trophies in the old one.

When the Los Angeles Lakers and the Montreal Canadiens are hanging out at the bar and the Yankees walk in, those two teams just have to finish their drinks and go home. Or to a different bar.

“We should go.” It’s embarrassing.

And it’s not just the raw numbers-- statistics are boring. The Yankees have the legends and historic edge, adding even more patina. They have the logo and the lore and the players. It’s beyond me how they can even field a team with the numbers they have left-- 22 having been retired. That’s why a guy like Aaron Judge wears 99. There’s no numbers left!

There are more NYY references in literature and music and pop culture than all the other sports combined. They come from the fucking Bronx. And no, it aint 1961 anymore. And it’s true that the ‘new’ Yankee Stadium lacks the authenticity of the old park. Vincent and I went there last summer cheering for the visiting Mariners and didn’t even get sneered at, let alone knifed. There’s definitely more avocado toast & Bombay Sapphire than there once was, but it’s still a deep, generational fan base of educated baseball people who are at this moment going out of their damn minds in anticipation of tonight’s 5:08 (pdt) first pitch of the 120th World Series.  

Sports fanatics are dangerously weird. Brad and his Packers; Jason and his Saints. Julie and her Sounders. My whack cousins from Boston and their ‘City of Champions’ routine. All my suffering fellow Mariner fans. But Yankee fans are a breed apart. They can afford to be, of course, with all their pennants & gaudy hardware. They can offer a fake conciliatory wink, suggesting that we’re all just fans of the game and that we just hope the best team wins in 7 games. But that’s a bunch of baloney. At the end of the day—at the end of the season, every season—they’re as greedy and seedy as any zealot. 

The Yankees don’t always win the World Series. The late ‘70s were good years for them (see: Mr October) and they went to three straight, winning the last two. But that first series was a tough one, being swept quite insensitively by arguably the best baseball team ever assembled in the 76BRM. It had been 12 seasons without an appearance before that run, and it would be an even longer wait till the next one. But seemingly before anyone could say Yogi Bera it was the late ‘90s.

I don’t have any particular love for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Evan’s the only one I know for sure is rooting for them tonight (as opposed to merely rooting against the Yankees). But I hope they win. In seven…

It’s the series everyone wanted all along even though we all said we’d love to see the impossible Mets or uppity Royals. But it isn’t just Boris and Stone and Mitch willing the Yankees to the Fall Classic. We’re all suckers for nostalgia, and between the Yankees and the Dodgers, this Series will be nostalgic AF.

Play Ball…

Read more about the 1976 World Series here, in Chapter 9 of my novella ‘Like a Nepenthe.’

Baseball on the radio

Nobody cares about baseball anymore. The kids just wanna hear a good beat…

Oh, I’m used to it. It’s just that I don’t expect the chalk rubbed in my eyes this early. I don’t expect it on the first day of a seven-month season.

And not only do I not not expect it, I actually understand it. I don’t agree with it. But I do get it, intellectually. Baseball is a game starkly out-of-step with American culture. In a society driven by violence and 140-character presidential press conferences, most Americans don’t really have time for baseball. It takes too long. It’s too slow. It’s so fucking boring. There are no cheerleaders.

And so baseball is dying if not a justified death, then at least one that can’t be convincingly argued against. Once known as America’s Pastime, professional baseball is now not only the least-profitable of the ‘big three’ but also is probably not even in the big three at all. Major League Soccer is a much bigger draw in the North American markets in which it competes and even dim ol’ hockey—once discreetly considered the laughing stock of professional sports—is demanding more attention. Baseball is dying on the vine. The death is a slow one—almost as slow as the pace of its games. But it’s dying just the same.

Presumably we’ll find MLB under ‘More Sports.’ WtF is UFC anyway?

And on most days it’s just fine because there’s more room for me. Plenty of places to park and sit. An older, generally more-dignified audience without drunken wave-starters or violent visiting team bully fanatics. Fewer little kids coming down off sugar and screaming for their parents’ phones. There are actually a lot of benefits to being the fan of a dead sport.

Unless the media indifference is so comprehensive that you can’t even listen to the game. At that point, it starts to get a little limiting.

Again—I am totally accustomed to chasing baseball around the radio dial in the late summer once middle school flag football pre-season starts, because my local radio affiliate understands very well that the audience for any football game or show is much larger and more susceptible to target marketing than the dusty old baseball fan worn down and advertised numb after 100+ games.  This affiliate is contracted on some level to broadcast not only all Seattle Mariners games but also the other higher-profile baseball events of the season– including Sunday Night Baseball, the All-Star Game and the World Series (if not the entirety of the MLB playoffs). It’s surprising, however, how many of these events they do not end up broadcasting in favor of high school football, college football, NFL football or even the motherfucking NFL draft. KPUG actually pushes contracted live sporting contests to its flat-chested sister station in order to broadcast an indulgent, droning 48-hour circle-jerking sports business transaction, regardless of how well the baseball team is performing at the time.

The draft is in late April. Early in the season– but it’s an isolated event. The real football pre-empts are still months away.

But this is the first year I can remember Opening Day being spun off to lil’ sister, and the fact that it was in order to broadcast March Madness is just icing on the turd for me.

Forget sports. There are few cultural phenomena of any root that I loathe more than the Final Four. I oughtn’t get into it here, but I do dislike it even more than the football nonsense. That’s never before been out of envy, because I can’t remember it ever interfering. Until this year.

Still, I don’t blame college basketball. As much as I enjoy torturing my understaffed local radio station dudes, I can’t really even find it in my crackerjack toy heart to blame them. There’s no sense in blaming football—it’s too dumb to know or care.

And really, there’s no actual need to blame anyone. I don’t think anyone is intentionally killing baseball just to spite me. Not even the game itself is rooting for that. MLB is doing what it can to salvage a shred of its shrinking audience by speeding up the game and cranking up the walk-up music. The Russians aren’t involved, I’m sure. No: blame has no role in this pickle.

I just want to listen to the damned ballgame. And it irks me when it’s not there for me when I turn my AM radio on for the first time since October. And when I do actually find out where the Cascade Radio Group has hidden the broadcast, they don’t even play the pre-game show! As if 60 more minutes of Men At Work and Wham! is going to matter one way or the other to the casual ‘80s spitbubble rock radio listener at 3pm on a Thursday.

The average age of the modern baseball fan is 59. Incredibly, I am young for the sport. Hard-fought efforts by the league including limiting mound visits and kind of instituting a pitch clock have shaved

minutes off the average time-of-game. Ultimately does it make any difference? I doubt it. I still roll my eyes when a player walks to first base without four wide ones being tossed his way. It’s going to result in a 40-second reduction in the time of the average game? Big deal. Play ball.

I’m sure you’ll just be doing backflips to learn my dilemma is solved—ironically through technology. When I did turn on my radio at the top of the pre-game show hour Thursday and heard not the familiar French Horn fanfare of the Seattle Mariner’s pregame broadcast, but the braying nonsense of some aged-out jock analyzing some other jaggov’s analysis of a college basketball game– I did what I’d known for many seasons I should have done. I picked up my cellular telephone and downloaded the ESPN app. Ninety seconds later, I was listening to the soothing sounds of Shannon Drayer navigating the first of 162 pre-game shows as only she can. Now I’ll be able to just walk around my house with the phone in my pocket, and the game (and pre and post game shows!) will just follow me around as magic. No more turning on and off the five AM radios stationed strategically around my house and yard. I’ve gone wireless and I’ve got my local radio station to thank.

See you down the road when the internet get outlawed, fellas. In the meantime you won’t have Jeff Braimes to kick around any more…