Take me out to the ballgame

“Take the 2 to 149th, and the 4 to Yankee Stadium.” I couldn’t quite believe what the clerk had just told me. Yankee bloody Stadium!

The author at Yankee Stadium on May 6, 2005.

Telford Vice / Durban

IT all began with “B”. The neighbours, you see, had a set of encyclopaedia, which in those BC (before cyberspace) days meant you could avoid a dreaded trip to the library to get your school project done.

The neighbours also had a daughter who had a smile in her eyes. But I digress, already.

“Birds,” the teacher had said. So I needed a whack of words and drawings on birds.

“Could I borrow ‘B’, please,” I asked the neighbours.

Their encyclopaedia was American, and when I became bored with trying to be interested in birds I flipped the pages to another section.

What were the chances of the book flopping open at the start of its section on baseball? About the same as me discovering what that girl was always smiling about.

I never did. But I did discover baseball, in a big way. Soon I was practically living at the library, digging up every bit of material they had on baseball, and photocopying it and pasting it into scrapbooks.

Along the way I discovered Frank Lloyd Wright, Muddy Waters, Jackson Pollock (no relation!) and frustratingly tasteful studies of the nude female form. Eish, I digress again.

I found that on rare, magical days the CNA would stock American magazines that just might feature articles on baseball. I still have them, as well as 12 precious issues of Baseball Digest, circa 1985.

Remember, there was no Internet and and no satellite television, and my growing obsession was hungry and difficult to feed. But feed it I did.

There came a day that, as far as I was concerned in my little bubble in the East London Municipal Library, I knew more about baseball than it knew about itself. It must have been around the same day that a new teacher arrived at my school. Her husband was a Little League baseball coach. Again, what were the chances?

The rest is a blue of long hours in the summer sun, many base hits, homeruns — yup, I was pretty good — and the awful wrench when baseball closed down in East London.

None of this crossed my mind as I approached a staircase on the corner of West 96th Street and Broadway at around 5.30pm on May 6 this year.

Yes, that is a New York City address. Yes, I was on my way to see my first Major League game. Not just any game — a Yankee game.

Babe Ruth hit 714 homeruns, struck out 1,330 times, and had a .671 win percentage as a pitcher. In the summer of 1941 Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games. Lou Gehrig, a first-baseman, like me, played 2,130 consecutive games from June 1 1925 to April 30 1939. On October 8 1956, Mickey Mantle took a brilliant catch to keep Don Larsen’s perfect game intact. It remains the only perfect game (no hits, runs, walks or errors conceded) in World Series history.

They were Yankees all. I know these things as surely as I know the birthdays of my children, and I don’t care if you don’t believe that I didn’t have to look up those stats. Because I’m a Yankee fan, and we’re arrogant bastards.

Why baseball and not British soccer? Because I’m interested in baseball for what it is and not in the little boys’ wars that erupt between Arsenal and Man United supporters.

Besides, becoming a British soccer fan was only one step up the ladder of ordinariness from showing an active interest in everyday stuff like cricket and rugby.

Why the Yankees? They won. A lot. And they were from New York, which became, on long library afternoons, the centre of my universe. At the very centre of my centre was the Chrysler Building, which is what Angelina Jolie would be if she was made of bricks and mortar and stainless steel.

There was a time, somewhere between puberty and my first job, when I tried to tell myself that the Yankees didn’t matter to me; that baseball was a part of my childhood I had outgrown, like Coke floats and Squad Cars.

But I knew that wasn’t true. Why else would I buy The Citizen except for the reason that it was the only paper that carried the Major League scores? Why else did I set and stand, always, with my right foot turned inward towards my left? That was my cure for “stepping into the bucket”. That is, stepping away from rather than into the line of the pitch.

More than 30 years of dreaming and learning disappeared with me down that staircase at 96th and Broadway, and into the subway station.

“Take the 2 to 149th, and the 4 to Yankee Stadium.” I couldn’t quite believe what the clerk had just told me. Yankee bloody Stadium!

Bought the Metro ticket, swiped it, moved through the turnstile. And there they were — an army of people just like me, all of us on our way to the ballpark.

I have seen Yankee caps everywhere I’ve ever been, but to walk into a flood of people wearing them is as close to a religious experience as I ever want to venture. I stood there and let it wash over me for as long as I dared. But, of course, I had a train to catch. Sorry, we had a train to catch.

The subway lurched into the approaching night, and in an instant we were there. The air around my face seemed to be made of ice, and it was raining. Thirty years I’ve waited for this, and it’s raining!

One body-search later — “cellphones off, please sir” — I was on my way to tier 30, section CA, box 560X, row H, seat 10. But first, a beer. At least, what passes for beer in American baseball stadiums. Whether you spell it light or lite, it should be pronounced “yuck.”

Not so, however, the hot pretzel. It’s a huge, bready, salty, golden brown wonder; the perfect buffer against the sniping cold of a New York spring evening. Right: have beer and pretzel. Where’s that seat?

My seat was so far up my nose would surely have bled had all of my bodily fluids not been frozen solid. I had a perfect view of the foul pole, which neatly chopped in half the 60 feet and six inches that separated home plate from the pitcher’s mound.

Nevermind all that. I was in one wing of heaven’s mansion, staring down at another. Yankee bloody Stadium!

The drizzle abated. Perhaps it froze in mid-air. Suddenly there they were, the Yankees in their pinstripes. Derek Jeter (the Beckham of baseball)! Alex Rodriguez (A-Rod, you biscuit)! Bernie Williams (get a hit, ya bum)!

The opposition? The Oakland A’s. Take it from a Yankee fan, California baseball is one step away from a circus at the best of times and the A’s are the clowns. Their players used to be paid a bonus for growing a moustache, for goodness sake, and they still cling to that odd 80s fashion for white shoes.

The Star Spangled Banner boomed out, accompanied threadbare singing despite a crowd of almost 48,000, and we were all set.

Unease hung in the air like a cloud of noxious gas. The Yanks had lost 18 of their first 29 games. They were eight games behind the division-leading Baltimore Orioles, their biggest deficit since 1995. For a club that has won 26 World Series, that was a disaster.

But for the gaggle of fat Hispanic fans who sat two rows down the cliff face from me, each of them wearing a replica Jeter jersey, it didn’t seem to matter a jot. Their beer flowed as freely as their banter, not much of it memorable.

The eldest and best-fed of the Jeter jumbos kept an eye on the game while the others partied. He jabbed the ribs nearest him when attention needed to be paid, but he was the loudest between innings.

He also drank the most. Later in the game he wandered further up the stand to dispense some pearls of full-fat, high-carb wisdom to the bunch of teenagers who were yelling up a storm in the back five rows. Perhaps he told them it wasn’t a good idea to take their shirts off in the arctic weather. Then he turned on his heel, slipped, and crashed onto the concrete.

Bucket seats buckled as he rumbled downward like a runaway steamroller, missing me by a whisker. He lost his cap in the process. I handed it to him. “Thank you,” he said, and turned his head in the other direction: “Beer! Here!”

I tried not to think about how much light beer would be required to make a body of that size as drunk as it was.

The game? It was down there somewhere. The Yankees were 3-1 down going into the bottom of the eighth, but — with the help of a lunatic double steal — they pulled it back to 3-3. At which point I could no longer stay seated. I yelled myself warm as the ninth came and went with no change to the score.

Extra innings! Cold? What cold? Then Tino Martinez, at first base, neglected to stand on the bag and threw wildly to home, all in one shocker of a play. Two runs scored. Where the hell did he learn to play first base? Not in East London! And then ice-blooded reliever Mariano Riviera melted and walked in a run. Result: a 6-3 loss.

The disappointment was palpable as the Yankee army flooded back onto the 4 train. Four straight losses was not something the fans wanted to get used to. But, hey, they were our team and nothing would change that.

The stars in my eyes still dazzled as I stepped onto the platform at 149th, and I was suddenly lost.

“Which side of the tracks should I be on to take the 2 back to 96th?” I asked a woman who turned out to be waiting for the same train.

We got talking and, with a smile in her eyes, she said, “You should come up to Harlem tomorrow.”

“I leave tomorrow,” I said. “Next time.”

SA Sports Illustrated, September 2005