[Note: In honor of Father’s Day, I am re-posting a column I wrote for the Daily Journal in September 2008 in honor of my dad – and sons of fathers everywhere.]
There are a litany of reasons why baseball is no longer America’s favorite pastime, but an argument could be made that it is still America’s go-to sport in times of bonding, stress and leisure.
We watch football now for its fast-paced, violent nature – it keeps our attention span because of the shortness of each season. (And because we need 22 points from our starting running back in order to beat a friend in our Fantasy Football league.)
But I have a newly concocted theory about why baseball has fallen off our list of great loves. I formed this theory from Box 215, Seat C2 in Yankee Stadium last weekend with my dad.
Now for anyone who’s read this space more than once, many of you know I’m a card-carrying member of Red Sox Nation. And dear old dad is a Yankee fan.
That last paragraph is in some respects what’s wrong with baseball. It couldn’t – and can’t – keep fans of teams. It keeps fans of players.
Allow me to explain.
My father became a fan of the New York Yankees during his youth in the 1950s. I say that, and many of you immediately think of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford.
When my old man went off to serve his country in the late 1960s, he had a shoebox collection of baseball cards of these players and many others. They were a treasured part of his youth, his favorite team and his favorite sport.
While he was away for 18 months, my grandmother trashed the box while cleaning out his room, unaware of its contents. My father was devastated by this news upon returning home from South Korea.
People do not collect baseball cards like that anymore, and certainly are not affected at that level by the loss of them.
Cards or no cards, the passion continued. He’s loved watching and rooting for the New York Yankees all his life. Once a Yankee, always a Yankee.
Until free agency came along, that is, and basically everyone’s been a Yankee over the last 20 years. If you had a decent year, George Steinbrenner would Godfather you into a Yankee uniform (in other words, make you an offer you couldn’t refuse). Never a big fan of the Yankees anyway, it was easy for me to hate them when they gulped up free agents and bought titles.
And then the Red Sox started doing that in the last 10 years, so perhaps it is all the same.
The hard truth is that all we’re rooting for is laundry. The players are gone from year to year. If Mantle played today, he would never have played his whole career in Yankee Stadium. Once his Sabermetrics dropped, he’d be traded to another team, with the Yankees still paying his salary five years later. Furthermore, if this were 40 years ago, Pedro Martinez would have never left Boston. It just wouldn’t happen.
Nevertheless, my dad remains true to the Bronx Bombers. And in all his life, he’d never seen the pinstripes play in the hollowed and fabled grounds at 161st Street in the Bronx.
I thought this was a travesty that needed to be corrected. So, for his 60th birthday, with the help of my wife, my mother and of course, Glenn Dunlap and the great folks at Big League Tours in Greenwood, we set off last weekend for the Big Apple and a big weekend of baseball.
You see, I may not be a fan of the Yankees, but I’m a fan of my father.
It was the trip of a lifetime, for him and for me.
A rainout forced a Saturday doubleheader – we spent 11 hours in Yankee Stadium and we were truly in awe for every minute. We didn’t want to leave, because as soon as we stepped off the Subway, you could feel it.
History.
Alive – and nearly speaking to us, with its ghosts and the roar of the crowd. It’s almost as if there were horns and trumpets playing every so softly, like something straight out of a movie.
Here we were, inside “The House That Ruth Built” – a place where the Great Bambino smashed so many home runs and teamed with Lou Gehrig to form the 1927 Murderer’s Row lineup. In fact, it was Ruth that hit the first home run in the stadium, a three-run shot to defeat – you guessed it – the Boston Red Sox – in the first game played in Yankee Stadium during the 1923 season.
Sitting there, roughly 25 rows behind home plate, you could almost hear the speeches given on those hallowed grounds, ones that are as revered in sports and life as any made by a president or politician. Namely, Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man” speech and Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech.
Then, your head starts spinning when you realize Yankee Stadium has been host to 37 World Series. Wrap your mind around the fact that Gene Tunney, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali all fought here in some of the greatest boxing matches ever. Remember that the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts played here in one of the NFL’s greatest games in 1958.
Three Popes have celebrated Mass inside the stadium; a memorial service for 9/11 victims was held here on Sept. 23, 2001.
There’s the Frieze (the white architectural work that runs all around the stadium’s outfield walls). There’s the Big Bat (as shown on several episodes of “Seinfeld”) and of course, Monument Park.
I don’t think I’ve ever had goose bumps and the hair stand on the back of my neck for a longer period of time in my life. And that was before the games even started.
When they played a video commemorating New York and the 9/11 victims, showing the tattered and torn American flag, you could have heard a pin drop. When “God Bless America” finished, the cheering at the end by the crowd was so loud your ears rang.
It was quite emotional, sharing that moment of silence surrounded by New Yorkers who would never forget and reminding us that we shouldn’t either. But it was also a reminder of how baseball soothed the pain that fall of 2001, providing us with a memorable World Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and of course, the New York Yankees.
Once the games began, delightfully, I watched my father’s eyes beam with joy as we witnessed the 10th and ninth final games to ever be played in Yankee Stadium. In a way, we had become a part of its history as well.
Dad can forget about those lost baseball cards now. He has something much more special.
Just like so many, my dad and I played catch when I was a kid. He coached my Little League teams and came to every game in high school. In the summer of 1998, we glued ourselves to the McGwire and Sosa home run chase. In 2004, my mother wouldn’t let us speak to each other during the ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox, in large part because a year earlier the playful banter between he and I got so carried away she couldn’t take hearing about it.
Our trip to an 85-year old stadium meant far more than a trip to a football game ever could.
That’s something that the NFL can’t ever get its hands on: the history of the sport, the bonds formed between millions of fathers and sons playing catch. Where else, in what other sport, can you step into a field or a stadium and feel its history so vividly?
And it will soon be gone.
The way sports should be is to not necessarily make us fans of a particular multi-million dollar player or a specific play – but of history and of the bonds formed through time spent together.
Because at the heart of all sports experiences, is a love of the game. Many of us developed our love of baseball or basketball or football or field hockey or swimming from our experiences as youths and in part because of the passion of our parents.
We’re fans of our fathers and fans of our mothers and what they loved. That’s how sports are passed down, generation to generation – not because of David Ortiz or Derek Jeter, but because of how we remember with fondness watching the exploits of Jeter and Ortiz, the same way our parents did Mantle and Ted Williams. And sports are passed down fondly because we share them – together.
And that’s why dad and I had to go, because it was Yankee Stadium.
Because it was my father.
I may not ever be a fan of the New York Yankees, but I’ll always be a fan of my father.
worldbetweenlines.com 