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Look back at: Divisional Playoffs |
League Championship
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Saturday, October 21
Expect Subway Series to be pure madness
By Jayson Stark
ESPN.com
NEW YORK -- There is still time to grab the kids, secure the valuables and make that last-minute run to the ATM. But not for long.
The rest of the country will be floating off into the Pacific any minute now. And all that remains will be the five boroughs of New York City, and possibly several select neighborhoods in New Jersey.
Yes, the Subway Series is upon us. New York-New York. Mets-Yankees. No. 4 train-No. 7 train. Major Deegan-Grand Central.
You may not want to be a part of it. But you have no choice. No more Seattle, St. Louis or Oakland datelines will be permitted by commissioner Selig to appear on your computer screen. And of course, Milwaukee, Minnesota and Montreal will be required to cease to exist for the rest of October -- as usual.
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I've never met anybody who likes both teams. They may tell you that. But deep down, they're either Mets or Yankees fans. I don't think it's possible to be both. ” |
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— Dwight Gooden |
"This," said ALCS MVP David Justice, "is going to be unbelievable."
He means that in a good way. We think. But feel free to take this any way you please. Those little-town blues are melting away. And who the heck knows how that will play in sections of rural Idaho?
But it doesn't much matter because the Mets and Yankees have essentially caused Idaho and 48 other states to secede from the union.
So watch out for flying film clips of Don Larsen and Sandy Amoros. They'll be airing pretty much around the clock for the foreseeable future.
"It's gonna be crazy," said the Mets' Benny Agbayani. "We're gonna have an earthquake in New York, I think."
Now that he mentions it, they almost had one Tuesday night in Yankee Stadium, as the Yankees were putting away the Mariners, 9-7, in the Subway Series warm-up act occasionally referred to as the American League Championship Series.
For six innings Tuesday, there was actual doubt that this grand, not necessarily much-awaited Subway Series phenomenon was as imminent as seven million New Yorkers seemed to assume.
As the sixth inning dawned at The Stadium, the mighty Yankees trailed the exceedingly uncooperative Mariners, 4-3. Until the fourth, in fact, the Yankees were even down, 4-0. Given the fact that the Bombers hadn't won a game in which they trailed by four runs since Aug. 27 (44 games ago), that could have been grounds to have the entire metropolis declared an official nervous-breakdown area.
But this was October in Yankee Stadium, a place where magic oozes out of every blade of grass. So naturally, the Yankees pulled another six-spot out of their deep blue caps.
The Subway Series T-shirts were already rolling off the silk screens as Jose Vizcaino beat out an infield single to lead off the inning.
The commemorative subway tokens were being minted as Derek Jeter singled Vizcaino to third.
And as Arthur Rhodes was marching in to complete this regularly scheduled implosion of the Seattle bullpen, they were already placing the New York-New York caps on the shelves.
Justice took care of the rest, pounding a three-run homer that might have clanked off the Empire State Building if the upper deck in right field hadn't gotten in the way. And it was time to cue Sinatra. The entire baseball world was about to wake up in the city that never sleeps, like it or not.
"It ought to be a hell of a Series," said Yankees GM Brian Cashman. "Hopefully, everyone will enjoy it because we're talking about the best city in the world and the two best teams in baseball performing on the best stage in America. It doesn't get any better than that."
Of course, that's easy for him to say. He and his team will get a police escort down the Grand Central when they drive to Shea.
But out on the streets of the big city, a veritable civil war is about to bust out.
There are Yankees fans. And there are Mets fans. But if there's anyone in town who claims he's a fan of both, they need to be attached to a lie detector immediately.
"I've never met anybody who likes both teams," said the Yankees' Dwight Gooden, who has had the rare fortune of playing for both teams. "They may tell you that. But deep down, they're either Mets or Yankees fans. I don't think it's possible to be both.
"In fact, I was talking to a couple of guys today. They're brothers. One's a Yankees fan. One's a Mets fan. So there will be hostility all week inside the family, brother to brother."
Brother to brother. Franchise to franchise. Subway line to subway line. It's all so complicated. All so nuts. All so vintage New York.
Many New Yorkers have long believed the rest of the country didn't exist, anyway -- that it was all done with special cinematic effects. So now they'll have no reason to acknowledge any other forms of intelligent life outside the city limits. And that might seem dangerous to several innocent bystanders in Montana.
But the fact is, this is bigger than geography. It's bigger even than a Letterman Top 10 list. There's so much tradition, so much history, so much romance involved in this whole Subway Series thing that if you're turned off by the sheer New Yorkness of it, you're missing the point.
There have been 13 other Subway Series in baseball history. And the names that passed through them are the names of myth and legend: Ruth. Frisch. DiMaggio. Ott. Mantle. Mays. Berra. Campanella. There is more to those names than New York -- way more.
And the last of those 13 Subway Series was in 1956. We're pretty sure that was before cable, the Internet and Oprah. So think how different an experience that Series was than this one will be.
"That was a time that was so much more pure," said the official comedian of The Bronx, Billy Crystal, from the Yankees clubhouse on Tuesday. "Television was just coming into the fore. So there weren't highlights of every player. It was all about the written word and radio. So there was almost a folklore to those players.
"The greatest announcers of the day -- Mel (Allen) and Red (Barber) and Vin Scully and Bob Prince -- were in New York, creating that folklore of the Mighty Babe and the Iron Horse and Joe DiMaggio. How many people had actually seen those guys play? There were eight teams in each league then, and they didn't travel west of St. Louis."
That's what the Subway Series was then. Now contemplate what this Subway Series will be now.
Round-the-clock media overkill. A new world's record for commemorative trinket production. And more satellite trucks in New York than humans. Which isn't easy.
If this Series is all about hype, those Subway Series were all about romance -- the romance of a different time, when the guys who wore those uniforms seemed like your guys, not guys just passing through because these were the only two teams that could afford them.
"Back then," Crystal said, "these players actually lived in their towns year-round. Many of the Dodgers lived in Brooklyn. They walked to the ballpark -- Jackie (Robinson) and Gil (Hodges) and Duke. So back then, they were the stoic Brooklyn boys taking on U.S. Steel, the team that won every year.
"Now you've got guys in this Series making $13-14 million a year. And I don't think the teams like each other. So that makes it great."
Yep. Think of the tremendous plot lines.
We've got all this pent-up aggravation of the Mets and their fans, consigned to a lifetime of second-fiddledom.
We've got the precarious perch of the Yankees, winners of three World Series in four years, trying to hang on against the hated Mets and win one more trophy as their team seems to age before your eyes.
We've got Clemens vs. Piazza, with Don King in one corner and Bob Arum in the other.
We've got Joe Torre, who has managed both teams, and Gooden, who has pitched World Series games for both teams.
We've got Tino (Martinez), and we've got Timo (Perez).
And we've got real live people choosing sides, making bets, celebrating their city.
So who cares if the Subway Series might not play everywhere. It will be playing big-time in the Big Apple. And who knows what kind of madness that will entail?
"It will be nuts," Crystal said. "It will be insane. Whatever you have to take to calm down, I recommend you take it.
"And I would say, pick your cab driver very judiciously. If you grab a cab, and you've got a Mets driver and he seems a little crazy from sitting on his beads all day, watch out."
Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com.
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