Razzle Dazzle: Wally's Uneasy Summer

Razzle Dazzle
Wally's Uneasy Summer


Wally the Ex-Firefighter sounded unaccountably gloomy when reached on his cell phone July 31 while he secured a parking spot near Yankee Stadium before some cop declared it illegal.

"Proctor was just on the radio," he said, referring to Scott Proctor, the overworked Yankee relief pitcher who had been traded to the Dodgers. "He sounded like they ran his dog over. You use a guy 83 times and then you trade him for a utility infielder?"

It's not that Wally gets sentimentally attached to everyone who wears the pinstripes. He merely thought the Yankees had traded the wrong reliever, even if the team would have had difficulty getting a bag of lollipops in return for Kyle Farnsworth, its hard-throwing but beleaguered set-up man.

Hitting His Target

"You can't use him," Wally said. "He crossed up his catcher," as if Mr. Farnsworth having hit Jorge Posada with a pitch he wasn't expecting had been certified as malicious mischief.

To the uninformed, it might have seemed Wally was picking an odd time to complain. The Yankees had won 14 of their 20 games since the All-Star break and were in serious contention for a wild-card berth. If they weren't yet breathing down the necks of the Red Sox, they certainly were a whole lot better off than they'd been at the start of the month, when their season was ready to be summed up by a Little League analogy.

NO CRYING IN BASEBALL: If the Yankees fail in their bid for a 13th consecutive playoff berth, those other than numerologists might ascribe it to curses cast because of their decision not to guarantee longtime star Bernie Williams a spot on the roster and to leave behind the stadium that Babe Ruth made famous for a newer model that offers greater revenue from luxury boxes. My 13-year-old son's Pony League team had been eliminated from a round-robin tournament in Bergen Beach on a perfect Sunday afternoon July 1 but was still required to play an evening game against one of the teams that could qualify for the championship game with a victory. One of his teammates, with the sense of irony you'd expect from a firefighter's kid, remarked as they waited to play, "I hope we get Mercy-Ruled."

A short time earlier, the Yankees had been romped and stomped by the Oakland A's, 11-5, a dispiriting loss that raised doubts that they could manage a 13th straight trip to the playoffs in October and had some fans wishing there was a way to invoke the Mercy Rule to stop the season before it got too depressing.

The following night, Wally the Ex-Firefighter was expressing such sentiments in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium. It was the top of the sixth in a 1-1 game, but perhaps because of Roger Clemens's tendency in preceding games to lose it in that inning, Wally had segued from a few inscrutable comments about how Clemens and the Minnesota Twins' pitcher, Boof Bonser (whose pear shape suggested his nickname might have come from his fondness for the buffet table) had switched teams, to offering a post-mortem on the Bronx Bombers' chances.

"The defense is bad," he began. "They don't hit enough. And I don't think the pitching's good enough for them to make a run."

As regular readers of this column know, even when the Yankees are going well, Wally tends to lose perspective at the first sign of adversity. Nine years ago, when they fell behind two games to one in the American League Championship Series against Cleveland, he was already devising ways to fix the team during the off-season; the Yankees pulled him out of his state of apoplexy by winning the next three games and then swept the San Diego Padres in the World Series.

June's Whoops and Swoons

Until the past few weeks, however, Wally's uneasiness couldn't be written off as his annual panic attack. The Yankees stumbled through the first two months of the season with just three hitters performing well, their starting pitching sporadic at best and their relief pitching a mess. When June arrived, suddenly the team seemed transformed, winning 14 of 17 games to position itself for another late-season run. When we walked out of Yankee Stadium late on Father's Day during a shelling of the Mets, Wally was as upbeat as he gets, goofing on John Sterling's ninth-inning play-by-play on the car radio as we headed home.

Just as suddenly, the team unraveled again during a trip to Colorado and San Francisco, with the same weaknesses it had shown earlier in the season resurfacing. This was not good for Wally, who since leaving the FDNY nearly two years ago has immersed himself in household projects that leave him with too much time to worry about his favorite team. Sportswriters were invoking 1965, the year the Yankees went from perpetual visitors to the World Series to non-contenders, as most of their stars seemed to grow old at once. Twelve years would pass between visits to the World Series, a span Met fans might consider acceptable but which seemed like life plus 20 years for Yankee rooters.

There was a more recent parallel, perhaps even more apt: the 14-year-gap in postseason play that began after the 1981 season, with the teams of that era defined by three strong hitters (Winfield, Mattingly and Henderson) and pitching that ranged from not quite good enough to downright awful.

Boss George's Hubris

I'd always thought of it as The Curse of Roy Smalley, ushered in by George Steinbrenner's hubristic decision in 1982 to bring in Mr. Smalley as a stronger-hitting shortstop than the incumbent, Bucky Dent. Except for his one shining moment in helping the Yankees win the 1978 playoff with the Red Sox, Mr. Dent had been a disappointment at the plate, but what Mr. Steinbrenner didn't realize was that the Yankees didn't need big offense from him. He was a reliable fielder who worked particularly well with Willie Randolph in turning double-plays. Mr. Smalley, in contrast, looked shaky in the field throughout his tenure, and to get him, the team had to sacrifice an excellent set-up reliever, Ron Davis, so it was actually weakened in two critical spots.

If you were looking for a similar curse to explain this year's edition of the Yankees, there were two possibilities. One was The Curse of the Bernie: the team's unceremonious see-ya to Bernie Williams when it wouldn't guarantee him a roster spot after 15 years of outstanding service because his skills had started slipping.

The other option was truly frightening because it portended the kind of long-term misery that had left the Red Sox without a World Series title for 86 years: a New York version of The Curse of the Bambino.

Construction had begun on a new Yankee Stadium, intended to replace the current one for the 2009 season. Could the ghost of Babe Ruth be rising up (or is it descending?) in righteous wrath against the abandonment of the stadium known as The House That Ruth Built?

So Much for Tradition

Mr. Steinbrenner's repeated invocation of "Yankee tradition" as if it were a coat of arms seemed a bit tinny with the team giving the kiss-off to its monument of a ballpark in order to add to its already huge profits by building a stadium with far more luxury boxes. It would be a fitting revenge for The Babe if the team began to decline and the Yankees struggled to put fannies in those suites, not to mention lost TV advertising revenue. With a pitching staff whose most reliable members were aging and a farm system that had failed to provide suitable replacements for departed stars, it was far from certain that the people running the team could use Mr. Steinbrenner's money to make wise choices in patching the holes.

Which, in turn, could prompt the team's biggest hitter, Alex Rodriguez, to leave all that Yankee tradition behind when he got the chance at the end of the year. Wally was among those who went to Talmudic lengths to try to determine the significance of the photograph in the July 1 Post of A-Rod's wife, Cynthia, wearing a shirt with an obscene message on it to the previous day's game. (As Mr. Sterling might have called it, "An F-bomb, from C-Rod.")

Did the shirt reflect a disillusionment with the whole Yankee experience that her husband also was feeling? Would the negative reaction to it make him more likely to leave New York if another team offered more money and less media coverage?

Shades of Ms. Benson

Wally's take on it was, "She's gonna Anna Benson his way outta New York," a reference to the outspokenly dim wife of a Met pitcher whose decision two winters ago that what the team's Christmas Party really needed was her in a low-cut Santa Claus outfit became his one-way ticket to Baltimore. Met fans consider Anna's boobery one of the greatest pieces of luck in team history, since the trade netted them John Maine and, eventually, El Duque, but Wally didn't think there would be any happy returns if A-Rod left town.

One son from each family asked for popcorn money and then vanished together for two innings. "That's $20 I'll never see again," Wally said. When I told him my kid had recently announced that they took the extended absences from our seats because he didn't like watching baseball nearly as much as playing it, Wally said that wasn't the case with his middle child. "He likes to take these long walks, buy some popcorn and check out the girls. Kinda like me."

Mr. Clemens got through the 6th inning with just a small scare, when Twins catcher Joe Mauer flied out to the warning track in left. In the bottom half of the inning, Bobby Abreu hit a long home-run to give the Yankees the lead, and two sharp hits followed, sending Boof from the mound.

'Embarrassed' by Rudy

During the pitching change, the scoreboard displayed a video of Rudy Giuliani urging on the Yankees, followed by a clip from the most recent "Rocky" movie. Wally, not a big believer in either mythical character, said, "These are the symbols of the Yankees: Rudy Giuliani and Sylvester Stallone. It's embarrassing."

"You could be talking about our next President," I said. "That's also embarrassing. And trouble." "I've got more reason to worry about being audited than you do."

Before the inning was over, the Yankees had scored three more runs. Our kids returned by the bottom of the seventh, and Mr. Clemens made it through eight innings, retiring the last 15 hitters he faced, before Joe Torre brought in Mariano Rivera to finish the game. At the sight of the bullpen door opening and the sound of the first notes of "Enter Sandman," we were on our way out of the ballpark, headed to our cars.

With all that rushing out, we wound up lingering to say goodbye alongside the fleet of sanitation sweepers behind which Wally had parked. It was one of those summer nights with a gentle breeze when it's a pleasure to be at the ballpark, and the Yankees had played neatly enough to stir hope that they might actually make some noise and rattle the teams in front of them during the second half of the season.

Magic Seemed Faded

But the suspicion remained that Wally for once had been justified in his half-empty beer-glass view of the Yankees' chances: that like the free parking in the bays of the old Bronx Terminal Market that offered a quick getaway onto the Major Deegan, the team's years of inspired comebacks might be gone.

Then the team won four of its next six games before the All-Star break and continued its hot play afterwards. But even as the Yankees closed in on the wild-card leaders, there were others who shared Wally's uneasy feeling. They were making their run against some of the weaker teams in the American League - Tampa, Toronto, Kansas City, Baltimore and Chicago - and probably should have won at least two more games during this stretch. Questions linger about whether their pitching - particularly the bullpen staff other than Mariano Rivera - will hold up when the tougher stretch of the schedule kicks in starting this weekend.

But even Wally realized the cloud over the team at the start of July had blown out to sea for the moment. The team was in the hunt and certain of playing meaningful games in August.

September was no sure thing yet, and even if they made it to October, would shaky pitching at their end and strong pitching by their opponents consign them to the same fate as the past two years: a first-round exit from the playoffs and Wally's muttering that they were becoming like the Texas Rangers of the 1990s?

But such thoughts could be banished for the moment as Wally left his car and strode up River Ave. in hope of seeing A-Rod hit his 500th home run. In the sort of typical case of Yankee excess that Wally loves, while A-Rod failed to produce, his teammates hit eight home runs in a 16-3 victory over the White Sox.

High on John and Suzyn

He could go on listening to the broadcasts on the radio and roaring with laughter at the disjointed partnership of Mr. Sterling and Suzyn Waldman ("I think they dropped acid today," Wally said during one afternoon game when the two announcers sometimes seemed oblivious to each other's statements of just a few minutes earlier). There was no reason to begin mourning the season, a process that would be doubly painful for Wally as long as the Mets continued their march toward the playoffs.

Hadn't the Cardinals stumbled through the regular season last year and then got hot in the chill of October and won the World Series? Hadn't the White Sox done the same thing the previous year? Wally wasn't going any further back than that, because to do so would be to remember that the 2004 World Champion Red Sox had been behind three games to none and trailing in the eighth inning of the fourth playoff game before running the table against the Yankees.

There would be time enough to ruminate on the fact that the Yankees were probably the superior team that year, and so Boston's mastery so far might also evaporate in the mists of the fall.

For now, it was enough that Wally's pessimism could be tempered by that most valuable commodity for any baseball fan: hope.