So, that’s that. The World Series over, the Yankees dethroned at last. I sat on the couch last night at the beginning of the bottom of the ninth, chain-smoking, every muscle in my body tense, and watched it go from bad to worse and suffered six heart attacks and cringed and gasped and writhed on the couch and contemplated extinguishing my cigarette in an eye — my eye, Mariano Rivera’s eye, whichever — but when the Diamondbacks put men on first and second, I knew then that we’d already lost. Rivera had had occasional outings during the regular season when he’d come in and seemed to have good stuff but just gotten mugged by the hitters anyway, and I knew it when I saw it last night, and when I knew it, knew that we’d gotten beat, knew that we’d lose as surely and inexplicably as I’d known that Brosius would once again pull a home run out of his ass in Game Five, I could finally relax. The bases got loaded up and Arizona kept coming on and I sat there and felt, strange as it sounds, relieved.

I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like it that my team lost, and I don’t like it that Yankee haters the world over will now feel free to gloat unattractively and inappropriately for months to come — and many, many people hate the Yankees, with a passion that never fails to startle me with its depth and breadth and heat, often people who don’t even follow baseball. The Yankee haters kept said furious passion in check during the 2001 post-season, out of respect for the tragedy suffered by the city of New York, but now that the team has finally relinquished its grip on the world championship, the gloves have come off again. And I don’t like it. I didn’t like it in past years, when anti-Yankee folk accused us of buying a championship team, or of selling our souls to the Devil, or of scuffing the ball or spiking the opposing teams’ second basemen or drinking goats’ blood or trafficking in child pornography or whatever wild unconsidered accusation let them sleep at night when they couldn’t field a team to beat New York, and I don’t like it now. I didn’t like it when they made fun of Jeter for The Mariah Carey Thing and called O’Neill a crybaby before, and I don’t like it now — not least because, now, I find myself in the position of defending the losers, and anything I say sounds like sour grapes. Before, I could sniff, “Fair, schmair. You want to win? Beat us, bitches.” Before, at least I could take comfort in the fact that everyone hated the Yankees because the Yankees won everything all the time. Not anymore. Yeah, we won the pennant, but it’s not the same. Yeah, the team got farther than it had any earthly business going this year, but it doesn’t matter. Rivera blew it, we lost, the city won’t get a parade to lift its spirits, and sour grapes taste…sour. I like sweet, victorious grapes! I like winning! I like gloating! The winning and the gloating have ended, probably for the foreseeable future! And no sir, I don’t like it!

And now the team will get broken up, and I don’t like that, either. O’Neill is doing a Garbo about whether he’s actually retiring, but really, if he doesn’t retire, the 2002 season will go down in history as the year an outfielder’s legs actually fell off during regulation play, and I don’t think Mrs. O’Neill is going to go for that. Martinez and Brosius and Knoblauch all have their heads on the block, and at least one of those heads is going to roll, and it makes sense for the team, but I’ve gotten used to these guys and change is bad and I don’t like it. Jeter’s knee wants a divorce. The starting pitching…I can’t even think about the starting pitching. Or the bullpen. What exactly is the plan for the Yankee bullpen here — to acquire as many guys whose names start with W as possible, preferably from church-league softball teams? Seriously. I think Witasick used to sing in the choir with my mom, like, a mighty fortress is our TOTAL FAILURE TO DEVELOP A CURVEBALL. Ugh. Not good. Not going to get any better. Not liking it.

And yet, more than anything, it’s relief that I feel. The Yankee-hating gets really old, but maybe it’ll die down now that another team finally has the trophy, and the “neener neener” is irritating, but compared to the usual “yeah, you won again, big whoop” and “congratulations on RUINING BASEBALL for everyone ELSE in the WORLD by BORING us all TO DEATH” bitterness, it’s a nice change of pace. It’s a relief, too, that the post-season is over, because it’s taken years off of my life. Sure, we all rooted extra-hard for the Yankees because of September 11th and win one for the city and rising from the ashes of Ground Zero and blah blah blah, but I’d resigned myself to a loss in the division series, only to white-knuckle it through all five games when the team decided to climb out of the grave and win the damn thing. Then I thought we’d surely lose to Seattle, but the Yankees thought otherwise and gave me another handful of grey hairs. Then we lost two in Arizona and I thought, “Okay, then. That’s the end of it. I can live with that.” But no. It went seven long, histrionic, gripping, emotional games, and I honestly can’t take anymore. Forget nail-biting — I ate most of my left hand during Game Four. Let the hockey fans take over with the curling up in the fetal position and the moaning and the recovering for a spirited rendition of The Derek Jeter Is My Husband And The Cats Are Hiding Under The Bed In Terror Victory Mambo. I need a break from the dramatics.

More than that, I need a break from Fox’s coverage of the dramatics. I’ve gotten used to Tim McCarver’s blithering by now, but Saturday night’s game marked a new low. With the score run up that high, McCarver and Buck didn’t have much to do, and they both sounded drunk. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn after the fact that they’d had a bottle of tequila and a deck of cards in the booth with them. “Give me all your…fours.” “Go fish. Soriano looks at strike two.” And I’d rather have heard them playing gin rummy, frankly, because when there’s not a whole lot going on during the game, Fox’s Obscure Yet Patently Obvious Statistics Department gets its chance to “shine.” The most runs scored during a Game Six by a team that plays in the desert, eh? Well, thanks for that, OYPOSD. I probably could have figured that out myself, but whatever.

And the camera angles…ay yi yi. What’s up with the Pore Cam Fox kept busting out every time a lull presented itself? Guys, guys — we just don’t need that tight a shot on Randy Johnson! I can pick out individual cells in his mustache hairs! And I don’t want to do that! Because Randy Johnson’s face looks like the surface of the moon, and it’s scaring me now! Stop trying to recreate the shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey where Keir Dullea’s pupils dilate madly! Zoom out! Please! And no, I don’t mean that you should cut to Andy Pettitte Born-Again Fierce Competitor Glare Cam, or Lost City Of Atlantis Located In The Folds Of Don Zimmer’s Chin Cam, or Let’s Sneak Up On Joe Torre To See If He Picks Right Now To Show Emotion After Five Years Oops No Emotion There Well Let’s Stuff The Camera Up His Left Nostril Anyway Cam. The “Fox Sounds Of The Game” feature is goofy enough (and really, do you think Bob Brenly’s going to say anything juicy or insightful when he knows he’s got a mic on? He can’t even curse, so what’s the point?), but I don’t see what we could hope to gain from counting Curt Schilling’s eyelashes, or from the weird Towering Inferno-style shots of the wives with their trowelled-on make-up and their 212-carat diamonds, looking all bored and occasionally muttering, “Touchdown? Um, yay,” like they don’t know what’s going on, or care. Great. Baseball players have wives. Bully for the baseball players. Point the camera at the field already. And one other thing, Fox Sports — you know how, every time you cut to Derek Jeter and he’s standing around in short left, chewing his bubble gum or adjusting his cup or doing a little infield-dirt housekeeping with his foot or just generally minding his own shortstoppy business out there, you Vaseline up the lens so it looks like he’s got a halo around his entire body and pipe in the sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” with the words “Derek Jeter” substituted for the “hallelujah” parts while CGI cherubs circle his head, and then he blows a little bubble and the little bubble has a halo too and McCarver’s all “Derek Jeter blowing a bubble, ladies and gentlemen — just a little bubble, a modest bubble, a bubble that reflects Jeter’s well-adjusted and down-to-earth upbringing as the successful product of an interracial relationship, a bubble that says, ‘I love America and also my mom'” while one of the cherubs alights on the bubble and begins to play the harp, and a stat pops up at the bottom of the screen telling us how many times Derek Jeter cured cancer with men in scoring position and McCarver’s all “Derek Jeter doesn’t litter, do drugs, return videos without rewinding them, or leave the toilet seat up. He cooks, does windows, goes to chick flicks without complaint, enjoys kittens and babies, can do the Times Sunday crossword in pen in under ten minutes, drives a sensible electric car, tips generously, and has no noticeable odor. He is, in short, a man without flaw. Did I mention that he’s also extremely handsome?” and we cut to Queen Elizabeth in the stands, sword in hand, ready to knight him after the game as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir intones, “Aaaaahhhhh-meeeeeennn”? Yeah…that? Quit it with that. I mean it. He’s a good shortstop, he’s cute, and by all accounts he’s a very nice guy, but stop slobbering on him, because it makes everyone hate him — everyone. Even his dad is probably staring at the TV and grumbling, “Goddamn pretty boy.” I don’t think you even realize that you do that, but you do, and it’s gross. Stop.

So, it’s nice to break free of Fox Sports (and the endless flogging of Fox primetime programming — I don’t ever want to hear Kiefer Sutherland bellowing “WHO ARE YOU WORKING FOR” again). It’s nice to see another team come out on top for a change — nice for their fans, and nice for their players, several of whom have toiled long and thanklessly for years and deserved a championship ring before they retired. It’s nice for New Yorkers that the Yankees got as far as they did, and it’s nice for the Yankees that they played hard and represented the city well, but also that they don’t have to do that anymore. It’s a relief for them, too, I imagine; ambassadorships can get exhausting. And now they get a nice long rest, and so do I. And they have a shiny new season to look forward to in four months. And so do I.

November 5, 2001

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