"October also underscores the by now yearly shattered dreams of Yankee fans...."
Free column today. Happy October! Please subscribe because we do this twice a week…and I don’t want you to miss any…..
It’s October. The most wonderful time of the year.
The leaves are exploding and the air is crisp and clean and the stores are all kickstarting their Christmas displays, ignoring the inevitable eye rolls of grinches everywhere. It’s firepit and flannel weather. Everybody smells like smoke and dresses like John Fogerty.
But it’s also playoff baseball time. I follow the standings all summer but rarely sit and watch an entire game. The regular season is so long, and NEPA summers are filled with too many distractions….like vacations and recessions and having our lives threatened constantly by blood-thirsty meteorologists. But the game itself is glorious and riveting, even more so now with the addition of the pitch clock. I used to be able to cut my grass between pitches of a 9 inning game. Now everybody needs to focus a little harder, and a 8pm start time no longer means staying up until the calendar flips over.
I’m a rabid football fan, but playoff baseball always takes precedent. Baseball players are not 350 pounds. They are not 7 feet tall. What they do does not appear superhuman. In a crowd, most major leaguers would not stick out at all. Nobody watching an NFL or NBA game thinks, even for a second, “I can do that”. But baseball provides that illusion. I can catch that fly ball. I can make that throw from the hole. I can hit that pitch.
Of course you can’t do any of these things. Hitting a baseball is widely considered the hardest act in ALL OF SPORTS, and there’s a reason one of the greatest athletes in American history, Michael Jordan, looked absolutely helpless when faced with a curve ball.
But that illusion still sucks us in like a tractor beam. There but for a fork in the road after tearing it up in Little League, could have gone I. It’s why baseball is our greatest game. Forever our national pastime. It’s played by magicians.
October also underscores the by now yearly shattered dreams of Yankee fans, who start each season in a frenzy of hope and dreams, only to nose-dive into a dark pennant race with the Red Sox for last place. This year their only consolation was not being the most disappointing team in the city. I’m trying to imagine the excitement of Met fans being told that Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer would be pitching in the post-season, only to discover that both pitchers sucked out loud for the Mets and were jettisoned mid-season to other, much better teams. This should not be surprising for a team that still has 60 year old Bobby Bonilla on its payroll, but you’d be surprised.
But so much for all that. We were discussing October baseball, and the Yankees and Mets, alas, do not apply.
I am a Houston Astros fan. To make a long story short, my brother moved to Houston in the mid 90s, and together we both fell for baseball again. The team was mostly awful, and then good, and then awful again. And then they won the 2017 World Series with the assistance of some blatant cheating, and have been reviled (and dominant) ever since, even though they won the Series again last year on the level. Here in NEPA I am virtually alone in my Astros fandom, which provides a nice “me against the world” mentality as I’m sitting by myself in my living room cheering them on, ignoring the trolling texts of my bitter Yankee-fan-friends, who haven’t won a World Series since Obama was President, and thus have little else to do.
But I am also a Phillies fan. I grew up with the Phillies on cable. The voice of Harry Kalas was a constant. And those 70s and 80s teams. Mike Schmidt and Pete Rose and Steve Carlton and Bob Boone and Larry Bowa . The great Tug McGraw, who when asked what he thought about the new artificial grass, responded “I don’t know. I’ve never smoked the stuff…” They were my boys of summer.
My father used to take us to Veteran’s Stadium to see some games. I have 2 distinct memories of this. One is sitting in the upper deck in left field and having a Mike Schmidt home run land practically in our laps. It did not seem even remotely conceivable that a man, who we could barely see from our vantage point, could hit a baseball this far. The other is, for the first and last time, seeing long lines of staggering drunk men waiting to piss into bathroom sinks. The Vet was an appalling place. Anything you touched you were liable to stick to. But Philly fans were (and remain) either the best, or the worst, in baseball, depending on your point of view of course. Their current star is the insufferably arrogant Bryce Harper, the kind of player Philly fans would despise (and relentlessly torment) if he were on any team but theirs.
But he’s the kind of player you get off the couch for. He’s the most exciting player in baseball. If he keeps up with his postseason heroics, they’re gonna turn him into a statue.
Of course, this being Philly, if he strikes out a few times in upcoming crucial situations, they’ll liable to burn him in effigy and stick For-Sale signs in his front yard. Philly can be a dark place. Ask Mike Schmidt, who DOES have a statue, and was once booed so relentlessly he took the field wearing a wig.
So I’ve been cheering for a second consecutive Astros / Phillies World Series, which is in jeopardy right now with the Astros down 0-2 to the Rangers. But you can be sure this is the match-up the baseball Gods prefer as well. A Rangers / Diamondbacks World Series is not gonna ring many bells.
If Astros / Phillies happens, I’ll be forced to start hating Harper. Which ain’t gonna be easy……but I’ll manage.
In a bit…
—tf
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