(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one issue over the course of a week. Normally, we try to answer a question, but this week, with the publication of “Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball,” by Will Leitch, we’re doing something different. For previous Tantrums, click here.)
First off, a confession. I am a sports fan, but a pretty lame participant. I am smallish and nearsighted and whatever the opposite of a gifted physical athlete is. Most of my game-playing has been of the variety where twenty-sided dice are considered sporting goods. My proudest athletic achievement, such as it was, came a couple of years ago in one of our publishing-league office softball games, when Hendrik Hertzberg and I were the starting pitchers, and I got the win. (I should add that we lost to The Paris Review that same season. That’s right: We got beaten by poets.)
But my bookish inclinations left me plenty of mindspace for Messrs. Winfield, Mattingly, Guidry, Murcer, Cerone, Nettles, et al., and being a Yankees fan may have been my first real disagreement with my father. I should explain that I grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, child of two Brooklynites raised in the 1940s. Do I need to explain? Kings County back then was a place where wearing a Yankees cap could get you beaten to oblivion and left for dead. There was only one team in Brooklyn, and when the Dodgers left, in 1957, it wasn’t a question of transferring one’s allegiance to another team. Baseball ceased to exist for many of the people of Brooklyn. As far as I know, my father didn’t go to another game for nearly twenty years, when he took me to Shea Stadium to see Tom Seaver pitch for the Mets.
It didn’t take. Around the age of 12, goaded on by my brother (to this day the most knowledgeable baseball watcher I know), I started rooting for the Yankees, and regularly begged to go to weekend games, which back then you could still do on the spur of the moment, fairly cheaply. It just stuck in my father’s craw, for three reasons. One, it was the damn Yankees. Two, he justifiably hated handing over money to George Steinbrenner. And three, we lived far enough away that the haul up to the Bronx and back was exhausting after a long week’s work.
But he did it, as often as he could stand to. He even warmed up to the Yankees, maybe because they were as second-rate in the eighties as the Dodgers had been in his youth, and because it was nearly impossible not to like the charming and shockingly well-adjusted Don Mattingly. And for his indulgence, I am grateful, particularly as I am only now understanding how wiped-out a workweek can leave a dad come Saturday morning.
I don’t know if my kid will do the same to me, but if he does, it won’t play out the same way. You can’t necessarily just show up at Yankee Stadium these days and be assured of getting in. A lot of games sell out months in advance; most are full houses; the remaining tickets are often colossally priced. A game has become a special-occasion thing, a birthday event rather than something you can just do. And there’s even a bit of irony to that: My son and I, unlike my father and my young self, won’t have to haul up the Jersey Turnpike to do it. We live right atop the Lexington Avenue line, with a straight shot to 161st Street/Yankee Stadium stop. Easiest possible trip.
Which is why he’ll probably end up a Mets fan, and drag me out to see them at Citi Field. All I can say is, I’m not calling it by its right name.
He can learn about baseball from anywhere. Who else will teach him what THAC0 stands for?
Stormsweeper: He’ll pick that up on the streetcorner, along with all the usual disreputable stuff.