I love the baseball postseason. Love it. And before you roll your eyes and fulminate quietly to yourself all, ohhhhh, right, of course she loves the postseason, she’s a Yankees (hoccchhh…ptui) fan, she’s practically got her own room in the postseason, that kind of gloating is why I hate the Yankees, gigantic payroll Princess Jeter salary cap no fun for the rest of us wah wah wah — it’s not because of the winning.

The winning is fun, sure. The winning is particularly fun in 2003 because, as of the beginning of the season, I didn’t think the Yanks would do much of it. I admitted to BSD, my designated baseball nemesis, that I had no choice but to call the Red Sox to win the division, and even in late September, I didn’t have much hope for the postseason — our bullpen had major issues (well, two: “Jeff” and “Weaver”), Giambi had a streaky year, and so on and so forth.

But as I’ve said before, winning isn’t why I watch baseball; winning isn’t why I love baseball. Winning isn’t why anyone loves baseball. Exhibit A…well, Exhibit A is the phrase “Tigers fan,” I guess. Exhibit B is conversations like this one:

Bean: Okay, I know Derek Jeter is, like, your boyfriend or whatever —
Sarah: Which part of the phrase “no, he isn’t” don’t you underst–
Bean: But what is he doing with his butt?
Sarah: His butt? Oh, you mean that sticky-outy thing when he’s at b–
Bean: Yes! What is up with that?
Sarah: You know, I don’t know. It is kind of annoyi–
Bean: It is so annoying! I mean, yay, Derek Jeter has a butt! Congratulations on your butt, Derek Jeter!
Sarah: I think it’s just part of his batting sta–
Bean: Like his butt is sooooo great or something! “Hey, check out my butt! It’s great! It’s the greatest butt that ever butted!”
Sarah: Okay, here’s the thing —
Bean: “It’s butterrific! It’s butt-tastic! It’s buttalicious! It’s like buttah!”
Sarah: You do understand that I can’t really control what Jeter does with his —
Bean: I. Want. That man’s patoot. Out. Of my face.
Sarah: I’ll…get right on that.

It isn’t about winning. It’s about sharing. It’s about speaking the same language, knowing all the Jeter terminology — The Jeter Hop, The Jeter Spin-Hop, The Jeter Semi-Time-Out Hand-Raise, The Jeter Helmet-Fiddle, and let us not forget The Jeter Sticky-Outy Thing He Does With His Butt.

During the regular season, the experience of baseball is more fragmented — dozens of teams, hundreds of games, thousands upon thousands of the little moments that make up a season — and you take most of them in on your own, driving home from work, chopping scallions in the kitchen, flipping through a catalog, listening, absorbing. You love it because it has a meter, a narrative drive, little stories in the service of a larger one, an epic still in progress.

And most of the time, you don’t talk about it. When I go out to the Stadium with BSD on a seethingly hot Fourth of July, neither of us says to the other, “We will now jointly experience David Wells getting shelled, and the sharing of the event will reinforce our love of the game of baseball.” Instead, we talk about how one of us (not BSD) forgot, on a seethingly hot Fourth of July, to apply deodorant, and how one of us (not BSD) also wore a sleeveless top, and how oops. We talk about how the one of us who forgot to Secret it up can and will smother the other one with an armpit of doom, should the other one cheer too enthusiastically for the Red Sox. David Wells does in fact get shelled, and I grumble disgustedly that I could have predicted exactly that, because everybody knows you don’t give the Fat Man the ball on a day so hot it seethes, but I don’t say, “You know, it’s nice that I don’t have to explain who I mean when I say ‘the Fat Man.'” It’s just something between baseball fans that is, and it’s part of what I love about the game — the call and response among fellow fans, the Venn diagrams where my history with the game overlaps with the histories of other people, the way I never get tired of cracking on Mo Vaughn.

On a Thursday night in June, I don’t know who else is watching; I can’t say for sure if it’s just me who notices that Andy Pettitte sometimes herky-jerks around the infield like he borrowed his legs right before the game and doesn’t know how to work them. Last Thursday night, I didn’t have to wonder. During the string of coronaries often referred to as “ALCS Game 7,” I knew I had company in my cardiac agony.

Of course, strictly speaking, I watched the game by myself, unless you count the cats, which I don’t, because first of all, when I ask the apartment at large if the ump is going to call the goddamn high strike or if I have to take a cab up there and call it for his fat ass, a sleepy glare is not an appropriately supportive response. A “seriously — what’s up with that?” is, I think, not a lot to ask. If you know how to hook open a cabinet door with your claw and break into a bag of kibble, you can learn how to speak English, so get on it. Second of all, I just spent ten minutes rooting frantically through sixteen bags and boxes in search of my Yankees hat, which apparently is over at Tempus’s house and therefore unavailable for rally-cap duty, and another ten minutes wrenching an old club hat from college inside-out, because I can’t use the Blue Jays hat, because it’s bad luck, so, cat who shall remain nameless but whose name probably rhymes with “Flowbee,” when I put the Blue Jays hat on your head and make you the rally cat, for the love of Christ just sit there and rally, because we need the help. Do not hiss. Do not yowl. Do not scamper around backwards like an imp with a brim. If I have to wear an inside-out hat on my head and look like a dork, so does everyone else in the house. Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have a fetal position to get back into.

It’s ridiculous, really, and I know it’s ridiculous, but the beauty of it is that, all over the New York area, all over the Boston area, all over the world, other fans dashed around their domiciles, drop-kicking useless hats through the living room and screaming at their pets and significant others, “WHERE IN THE SAM HILL IS MY YANKS LID?” Other fans curled up in tiny tiny balls on their couches with their rally caps on and pillows clamped over their faces, peering out with one third of one eye, limping into the kitchen all stiff with tension to shotgun a handful of Fritos during the commercials, sproinging around like human pogo sticks when the Yankees tied it up — or, conversely, whanging their heads angrily down on pieces of furniture, chucking entire bowls of popcorn at Grady Little, bellowing at Joe Buckwad to shut up, just shut up for five seconds, stop showing us Mia Hamm, stop showing us Robin Williams, just show the goddamn game, will you? We all went through it together. We all held our collective breath together. We all sputtered, “Aaron BOONE?” together.

No, really. We did. I think I speak for all Yankee fans when I say…that I don’t know what to say. I mean, Grady Little boned it, hard, and it’s pretty easy to Monday-morning manage — guess who sat on the couch demanding the Fat Man during that same game? Yep, right over here. Guess who sat on the couch demanding the hook after exactly one pitch? Right again, so what the hell do I know — but everyone watching saw Little’s mistake as soon as he left the mound without Pedro. On the other hand…Aaron Boone? Batting a buck and change, which for Aaron Boone is actually pretty good? What can you say about that? Because you can’t say the Sox “deserved” that loss. It’s like saying you “deserved” to get hit by lightning — it’s lightning. It doesn’t care what you deserve. I love my team. I like that we won. But…like that? On an Aaron Boone homer?

I’ve always enjoyed the rivalry between the two teams. I loved the Game 3 brouhaha. I think it’s kind of excellent that Don Zimmer charged a guy half his age, and I think it’s also kind of excellent that he bounced when he hit the ground, and I think it’s super-extra excellent that now I have proof of my long-held suspicion that Pedro Martinez is a little bitch — not because of the Zimmer thing, which he could have dealt with a lot worse. A rabid gerbil takes a run at you, see how well you handle it, is my point. But the pointing to his head? Please. The umps should have bounced him for that shit. But it’s a thing between two teams. Ramirez, Clemens, Posada, whoever threw at whom or incited what — it’s part of the rivalry. It’s part of the lore. It made things exciting. And then…Aaron Boone. Not that Aaron Boone isn’t a nice man, and good for him and everything, but Aaron Boone is inarguable evidence that God just straight-up hates the Red Sox. God does not hate the Cubs, I don’t think, because God never lets the Cubs get all that close, but God lets the Red Sox get within a single out sometimes, and then God says, “Yeah…PSYCH!” and Buckner gets the blame while God saunters off all, “Heh heh heh. Suckers.” And it’s not satisfying to beat a team God hates, because your team didn’t really beat them. God did. Way to take the fun out of it, God. Jerk.

On the other hand, God performed a miracle of sorts that night, because you can’t get Sox fans and Yankees fans to agree on much of anything, but I think both sides will concur that, as far as endings to such stories go, a walk-off home run by Aaron Boone is bullshit. It’s something that fans of both teams — that all fans of the game, in fact — can share, a weird apocalyptic memory to pass on to our children and grandchildren, along with the story about the downpour of frogs that hit Fenway back in aught-nine.

And now it’s last week of the baseball season. It’s on the anticlimactic side this year, but as bittersweet as always — whether we win or not, it’s still the last of it for four months. Fortunately, it’s going to leave me with one of my favorite images: Yankee pitchers at the plate. Hee. Nothing warms the cockles of the baseball fan’s heart quite like Roger Clemens in the on-deck circle, holding the bat by the wrong end and wrinkling his nose like he smells poo — unless it’s Mike Mussina standing in at the plate and frowning all Captain Serious while bent nearly double in that weird croquet “batting” “stance” he’s got. Hee hee. Good times.

October 20, 2003

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