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Giddy New Yorkers suspend pretense for Subway Series |
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By Ray Ratto Special to ESPN.com I think we can all agree that on balance, New York has handled the upcoming inter-borough World Series with the sophistication and dignity New Yorkers have always shown. In other words, Benny Agbayani was a guest on "Regis" Thursday morning. Sadly, we didn't stay with it long enough to see if Benny whipped up a batch of poi on the cooking segment. You see the point, though. With the Mets and Yankees turning the World Series into a neighborhood spat, we in the rest of the country are seeing New York the way we always secretly suspected it might be. As Columbus the week of the Michigan game ... as Tuscaloosa the week of the Auburn game ... as Los Angeles during Oscar week. One moment, they want to laugh at the rest of the nation for not having a rooting interest, and the next, they want to know how the rest of the nation sees New York. Well, now they know. We see New York as the kind of place that sees value in Benny Agbayani on "Regis." You know, as Indianapolis as it gets. There is something comforting in this realization, of course, because in similar circumstances, the rest of the country would put Benny Agbayani on "Regis," too ... if it had Benny Agbayani ... or "Regis," for that matter. Fact is, as the world gets smaller, everyone starts to behave the same. Witness, for example, the pernicious influence of "Who Let The Dogs Out?" which has become, to the eternal shame of the Baha Men, the "We Will Rock You" of the new decade. It began in Seattle, spread to San Francisco, and before anyone knew it, it turned into dot racing and find-the-cap-with-the-ball. You will hear "Who Let The Dogs Out?" a lot in the next 11 days or so. You will learn to hate it. You will be right in doing so. But the point is made. New York looks different when one of its teams is pitted against a team from the outworlds. It looks as smug, powerful and bullying as it can because New York feels that way about everywhere else. With Mets-Yankees, though, New York will look a lot like a guy grabbing himself by the shirtfront and threatening himself, "If I keep this up, I swear I'm gonna kick my own butt." You know. Stupid, but in an entertaining way. This is not a cheap attempt to make the rest of the country feel superior to New Yorkers. The Bay Area behaved in exactly this way in 1989, and when that seemed to go over poorly with television viewers from other parts of the country, it tore a hole in the earth just to get noticed. We suspect that St. Louis acted the same way in 1944, when the Cardinals and Browns faced each other just to put a charge in the locals before the Battle of the Bulge. And we can only guess that Chicago did the same in 1906 when the Cubs and pre-Black Sox White Sox faced each other. We are left with incomplete suppositions because most of the people who saw that series are long and safely dead, and because there is no photographic record of fans being carried off by pterodactyls, although we are sure there were such incidences. New Yorkers, you see, are just as provincial as the rest of us. The standard image they front off to us when they think we're looking will be nowhere in evidence because they are playing to the easiest audience of all --- themselves. New Yorkers won't be troubled by the $200 million in combined salaries of their two teams. They won't turn this into a tedious debate about the necessity of revenue sharing to save a game that keeps drawing more fans than it did the year before. They won't wring their hands about the Expos, Brewers, Royals, Marlins and how hard it is for their owners to win when they choose to spend one-sixth of what the Yankees or Mets spend. They don't have to. New York money is by its very nature bigger than regular money. It costs more just to bitch about how expensive everything is, but New Yorkers are accustomed to the crooked numbers on the price tags. Nor will New Yorkers wonder overly much about the national TV ratings. Most folks who couldn't scrape up three grand to buy a scalpers' ticket will watch the games at home and in huge numbers. They will paint their faces and dress up in full uniform, they will mug like drooling idiots for any TV camera that happens by, and they will swear their undying love for their team, even if, in most cases, they haven't been to the ballpark to see a game since the teams' second basemen were Ron Hunt and Horace Clarke. They will behave just as we would, just as we have. Because it is a small world, after all. And now, if you'll excuse us, Clay Bellinger and Luis Sojo are on News At Noon showing us how to take broken bat handles and turn them into crib slats. Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.  Copyright ©2000 ESPN Internet Ventures. Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and Safety Information are applicable to this site. Click here for a list of employment opportunities at ESPN.com. |
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