Most Chicago baseball fans found ways to put last year behind them and revive their spirits for the new season. Some delighted in the destruction of the cursed “Bartman ball,” while others found solace in devices that were more personal and private–if not as medieval. I took the nonrefundable airline ticket I’d bought so I could see the Cubs in the World Series in New York–a reservation originally made the afternoon of October 14, before the sixth game of the National League Championship Series (yes, no matter what anyone else might think, it was I who put the whammy on them)–and rescheduled it in order to join the White Sox when they visited the Yankees the first weekend of this season. It wasn’t the World Series and it wasn’t the Cubs, but it was a Chicago team and it was Yankee Stadium–my first visit to “the house that Ruth built.” Somehow it made things whole again for me, and it didn’t hurt that the Sox spanked the Yanks twice in a row.
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Yet I was surprised to discover that the stadium’s signature picket-fence arches atop the grandstand had been done away with in the remodeling of the 70s, retained only in the wedding cake ornamentation in the outfield. The white-brick apartment buildings that stretch off into the distance in the Bronx seemed bland compared with the variety of Wrigleyville. The ramps and concourses were cramped even by Wrigley Field standards, with none of the functional openness of Sox park. And most aggravating of all, neither inside nor outside the park, neither in the stadium stores nor in the street souvenir stands, was there a single piece of White Sox paraphernalia–not a cap, not a bat, not a pencil bearing the Sox logo. As I had planned to proudly wear a 1917 Sox cap but hadn’t had time to buy one in the rush out of town, it was irritating; but it also captured the essential egotism of the Yankees and their fans. For them there is only the Yankees; the opponent is merely something to play against, a backdrop.
Truth be told, the fans at Yankee Stadium Saturday were hardly more engaged. They didn’t bother to boo the Sox–not during Bob Sheppard’s famous introductions, not even after the Sox took a 5-2 lead–though they did boo underperforming Yankees like starter De Paula. And they booed a guy in a Boston Red Sox cap as he climbed to his seat just a few rows below where Gary and I were sitting. “Take away his beer!” Gary urged. If I wasn’t actively booing the Yankees–we don’t raise no fools here in Chicago–I was at least rooting on the White Sox. Leadoff man Willie Harris reached in the first on yet another New York error, this one by second baseman Miguel Cairo (the one non-all-star in the New York lineup), and Ordonez likewise picked up where he left off the day before by swatting another homer to left. Chicago shortstop Jose Valentin committed a pair of errors in the bottom half of the first, one of them on what would have been an inning-ending double play, as two runs scored. Yet he atoned in the second with a two-run homer, after doubles by Crede and Harris had already put the Sox back in front. From there, starting pitcher Mark Buehrle cruised, working effortlessly through the New York order as if he were facing a farm team and not the new “murderers row” of Jeter, Williams, Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi, Sheffield, Jorge Posada, and Matsui. Buehrle kept his weight back and the ball hidden and he was lovely to watch, allowing only two more hits through the eighth inning and retiring the last ten men he faced. Reliever Billy Koch allowed a run in the ninth thanks in part to his own error, but the Sox had padded their lead with a pair of runs in the top of the frame, and the final was 7-3.
That perfectly expressed the essential egotism of the Yankees fan: The opponents barely exist, and the regular season is a formality to get through before the games that really matter. If anyone thinks these were merely the jamokes talking, consider the New York Times headline, “Baseball’s Biggest Stage Suits Vazquez,” when newly acquired Javier Vazquez, brought over in a budget-cutting deal by the Montreal Expos, beat the Sox in the Yanks’ home opener last Thursday. After Buehrle’s masterful performance, the Times led the next day’s story with the headline, “Once Again, the Yankees’ Mighty Lineup Has Struck Out.” It wasn’t the other team’s success but the Yankees’ failure that dictated the outcome.
