Back in the Ballpark

HOW LONG HAS it been? In years, moderate; in discomfort, boundless. Other teams can claim longer dry spells, but none more humiliation. Others can claim deeper valleys, but none a farther fall. None can claim more vindictive, derisive press, none more vicious abuse, none a longer twelve years. But a tree grows in Carthage and the Yankees are winners again.

It was easy to be a Yankee-hater in the old days; the hate still floats too, with this new, streamlined set of players, when they go on the road. Even if you know nothing about baseball, you know plenty about the Yankees. It's like knowing about New York. You know the Yankees were rich, they won all the time, they hit home runs and married movie stars. If you travel around America these days you'll still find a jealous irrational hatred for New York City. The Yankees represented that part of New York the rest of the country revenges itself upon now.

Such poison! In 1959, the Yankee's third place finish inspired a hater to compose lovely verse. It was entitled, "To an ex-American League pennant winner."

Although you were defeated, Yanks,

You shouldn't feel too blue:

Just think of all your bars and banks

And bowling alleys too.

As businessmen you guys are tops,

It really seems a shame

That you should leave your shops

Just for a lousy game.

The Yankees lost only two pennants between 1949 and 1964. It would be silly to go over the list of names that wore pinstripes. It you care, you know them anyway--you don't need a catalogue. The generational continuity was astounding and the team had a farm system that would not dry up. This meant that there were always new young men ready to play and play better than the new young men on other teams. It also meant that the Yankees could do cold-hearted things like let go of their veteran All-Star shortstop Phil Rizzuto as a surprise gesture on Old Timer's Day 1956 sure in the knowledge that Jerry Coleman, Gil McDougald or Billy Martin (each a star on his own) would fill the hole.

Martin is back with the Yankees now. He manages the team. Before he could come back, however, he left as the scapegoat in the famous Copacabana incident of 1957. Some Yankees got in a brawl at a ritzy New York nightclub and Martin, the most expendable in the management's eyes, caught the rap. It was incidents like that which convinced fans the Yankees were a bunch of rich, cold stiffs. They got big salaries, the line went, World Series checks, and turned their backs on their old teammates.

Fans couldn't nuzzle up to their favorites in the huge, austere Yankee Stadium. In the comparative bandboxes of Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds a sense of intimacy between spectators and players reigned. In Yankee Stadium, you'd have to be Allie Reynolds just to bean an umpire with a bottle from the reserved seats. Fans came to watch baseball, not be part of it with the Yankee ball clubs. The majestic park begged for spectacle.

To drag out a list would be silly. One of the things that happened during those years when the Yankees incurred so much venom was that a Yankee pitcher threw a perfect game in a World Series; another was that a Yankee outfielder hit 61 home runs in a season; another hit 18 home runs and 42 runs batted in in World Series games alone.

In midsummer of 1965 I sat in Edgartown, Massachusetts, (an eleven year old,) reading the sports pages of The New York Times. Whoever was writing was wondering what the hell was going on. The Yankees were not playing like the Yankees ought to. They had lost more games than they had won and they were in sixth place. The writer assured me that the Yankees would, as usual, put on their big late surge and win. I asked my father what he thought. He frowned. "They don't look very good to me," he said; "What does the Times say?" I gave him the paper and pointed out the funny thing about the article was that the writer seemed to be taking a certain amount of pleasure from the Yanks' misfortune. We couldn't understand it.

In October 1966 the Yankees finished the season in tenth place. In 1967 they put players on the field like Charlie Smith, Ruben Amaro, Steve Whitaker and Horace Clarke. Whitaker was especially pathetic because he was one in a set of the "next Mickey Mantle" series. Whitaker came up to the Yankees, hit a cluster of home runs in his first week and then began to strike out. His collapse was awful to watch. Fortunately for him, not too many people came out to the park to look. Other "next Mickey Mantle" prototypes were Roger Repo, Bill Robinson and Bobby Murcer. But Whitaker handled the pressure worst. I kept his autograph on my wall long after he disappeared from the majors. I admit it's cheap mentioning that, but it's true.

Nineteen years, almost to the day, that he was unceremoniously dismissed in the midst of a ceremony, Phil Rizzuto stood on the field during Yankee Old Timer's Day and watched his old teammate Billy Martin take cheers as the team's new manager. Rizzuto was gray by 1975 and wore inexplicably large tinted aviator glasses which made him look like a 1,000,000X blown up slide of a house fly. If I were pretending to be omniscient I would tell you how Rizzuto felt watching Martin walk on the field to a huge ovation. ("Phil felt a lump in his throat as big as a hardball . . . he remembered how Casey had always said Billy would someday manage the Yankees . . . ")

Instead, I will tell you how I felt. I thought to myself: "This bum had better bring in a pennant. New York has enough crooks, skunks and incompetents running it without the Yankees bringing in another. I haven't enjoyed watching Bill Monboquette and Joe Verbanic playing terrible baseball for the last dozen years. I want to see a World Series."

Mr. George Steinbrenner, who dabbles in politics now and then but over all is not much more of a louse than most owners of the Yankees have been, has brought a lot of very fine players to the team. None of them looks like Joe DiMaggio or Ryne Duren but they are, nevertheless, superb players and they won 97 games for the team during the course of the season. A satisfying year.

During the bad years, if you took the "D" Train up to the Bronx and the Stadium, you could look forward to ducking firecrackers and waiting to see if Steve Hamilton would throw his famous Folly Floater (a high arc-lob which one day sent a bad-tempered Cleveland Indian literally crawling on his belly back to the dugout after he had whiffed three times on it; this the same day Bobby Murcer hit four consecutive home runs in the Next Mickey contest and Ray Fosse got hit by a cherry bomb which came flying from the second deck after he had started a brawl with both teams running out on the field to shove each other). Now you can go to see baseball played. Now you who hate the Yankees can go and hate in the old bitter and passionate and utterly unavenged way that you used to. It will do as much good now as it did them. Your poison is welcome. It means that at least for a moment the Yankees are the Yankees once more, and thanks for it.