October 24, 2012
A sporting addendum to yesterday’s geographic musings: it seems that the New York Islanders, the once-great Stanley Cup team of Bossy and Trottier and Potvin—more recently a pitiful squad playing in a decaying building to a mostly indifferent audience—are moving to Brooklyn and the Barclays Center! This is wonderful news for all of us who live on the 4 or 5 line, and can now see that team—or all the other teams (i.e., the Montreal Canadiens) who come to town to play them—with a minimum of trouble, and probably at less cost and with much less pain than it takes to go see the Rangers at the Garden. (Love the Rangers, love the Garden, but it costs an arm and a leg to get in—and if you wear the wrong sweater in the wrong section you might lose the other arm and leg before you leave.)
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October 23, 2012
Not much more than a week ago—though it now feels a lot longer—baseball spoiled us with four scintillating division series. For the first time since the addition of the wild card, in 1995, all of the opening-round matchups went to the maximum five games, and what compelling games they were. The San Francisco Giants became the first team in National League history to win a best-of-five postseason series after going down 0-2. Justin Verlander and C. C. Sabathia pitched dominant clinchers against, respectively, the pesky Oakland Athletics and the overachieving Baltimore Orioles. If that were not enough, the St. Louis Cardinals, who had to win a play-in game against the Atlanta Braves just to advance to the divisional round, were twice down to their last strike against the Washington Nationals before scoring four runs in the ninth to oust the team with the best record in the major leagues. This year’s playoffs picked up exactly where last year’s dramatic seven-game World Series ended: on the edge of a cliff. Baseball, it seemed, had put a hex on dullness.
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October 20, 2012
Few things are more reliable than the spate of quarterback controversies that pops up midway through every N.F.L. season. Public roster decisions like these rarely seem to involve running backs, or point guards, or, until the past week, third basemen, but it’s impossible to get through a football season without at least a handful of fan bases agitating for the backup Q.B. to get a shot. Quarterback is such an isolated position—in no other sport does a single player touch the ball on every offensive play of every game—that fans often overestimate their ability to judge good ones from bad ones. Overthrow a receiver, no matter the reason, and you stink. Hit him in the hands, and you can come back next week.
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October 19, 2012
The Yankees are dead; the corpse arrived in the Bronx in the early hours today, with no George Steinbrenner on the scene to snap at the bones. Embarrassingly swept by the Tigers in four games in the American League Championship Series, they scored a total of six runs in this usually engrossing or thrilling semifinal. More accurately, they scored four runs in the bottom of the ninth of Game One, erasing a four-run Detroit lead, before losing that game in the twelfth, and then two more over the ensuing thirty innings. Nothing like this batting collapse exists in the annals; nothing comparable comes to mind. Something beyond base hits is missing as well, because the sweet autumnal sadness that creeps over us when the last local team goes down clearly isn’t something to fall back on this time. Let’s settle for relief.
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October 19, 2012
When the Yankees win, people talk mostly about the team’s grand tradition and benevolent ghosts of the past—all that “mystique and aura” stuff. When they lose, though—as they did last night, for the fourth straight time to the Tigers in the American League Championship Series, ending what was another good season on a sour note—the talk quickly turns to the colder reality of numbers. In this case, the number closest at hand was two hundred million, which is the team’s 2012 payroll (rounded up a bit)—tops in baseball and standing in stark contrast to the team’s weak showing in the series. Other numbers stood out as well, including .075 and .100 (the playoff batting averages of Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson, who had just four walks and five runs-batted-in between them); six (the number of runs the Yankees scored in the series); two (the runs they scored after the ninth inning of Game One); and zero (the number of innings that they led in the series.)
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October 17, 2012
In late September, early voting began to determine whether Barack Obama gets to keep his job. Last week, in a slightly smaller but more revolutionary election, voting began to determine whether Adrian Hanauer, the general manager of the Seattle Sounders soccer club, gets to keep his. It would seem to be the first true moment in American professional sports that fans have been able to act out the demand they’ve written on so many stadium signs: Fire the Bums!
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October 16, 2012
Last night, the Brooklyn Nets played their first home game at their new arena, the Barclays Center. As meaningless preseason exhibitions go, it was, without question, the most exciting one I’ve ever attended. “There’s not a preseason vibe,” one attendee said, by which he meant that there was more hype and enthusiasm than typically surrounds a game that doesn’t count—never mind a game that doesn’t count played against a team, the Washington Wizards, that finished with the N.B.A.’s second-worst record last season. Inside, the vibe was less celebratory, more preparatory. Seats were still being bolted down and whatever pyrotechnics the Nets intend to unleash are being saved for the team’s regular season opener, against the Knicks.
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October 15, 2012
Pete Rose was in the news last week. He had, at the prompting of Joe Posnanski, issued an opinion on the likelihood that the Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter would beat his all-time hits record, which stands at four thousand two hundred and fifty-six. The verdict: not good. That opinion was not especially controversial: Jeter, already thirty-eight, trails Rose by nearly a thousand hits. Still, though, people had floated the idea, noting that Rose himself had collected nearly a quarter of his hits after turning thirty-eight. (Amazingly, Rose played until he was forty-five.) Perhaps Jeter would knock around the league for seven more seasons, slowly but surely chipping away at Rose’s record. Rose didn’t think so—“How many forty-year-old shortstops you see walking around?”—and plotted out the numbers in great detail, revealing both his still-sharp sense of how the game works and the fact that he’d spent a good deal of time considering the impregnability of his record.
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October 12, 2012
On the last day of his junior year of high school, in 1973, Ray Negron put on a button-down shirt, so his mother wouldn’t suspect that he was skipping class, and rode the subway to Yankee Stadium. He took the shirt off, bought a burger at McDonald’s, and started spray-painting buildings with a few friends. “What you waiting for?” one of them asked. “Tag the goddam stadium.” Negron took a can of white paint, walked up to a wall on the third-base line, and traced an “N” and a “Y.” Before he could finish, a man in a blue blazer approached, with, as Negron later described it, a face “red with a rage I hadn’t seen since my mother was about to whip my ass after she caught me taking quarters from my father’s pants pockets.” The man grabbed Negron by the scruff of his neck and said, “Kid, don’t you know who I am?”
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October 11, 2012
Among the peculiarities of this baseball postseason—the addition of a second wild card in each league, the cramped scheduling of the Division Series that required the teams with home-field advantage to open on the road, and two consecutive days of noon-to-midnight quadruple-headers—is one that the league offices could not control: the quirk of having four Bay Area teams among the final eight. San Francisco Bay, of course, is represented by the Giants and the Oakland A’s; but there is also the presence of two teams that play on or near the Chesapeake: the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles. Both bay regions entered these playoffs with the extravagant, if improbable, hope of an all-local World Series. Yesterday’s slate of games twisted the fates of all four teams. Today, in a twelve-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet of the national pastime, all four could be eliminated.
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