THE LAST PAGE
Wilentz, Sean
The view from Seats 17 and 18, Row G, Main Section 26, down the left-field line at Yankee Stadium, is terrible. The left-fielder, when not obscured by the foul pole, is the only player who is...
...Eventually, in the late eighties and early nineties, the Yankees' fortunes worsened...
...Everyone and everything else looks skewed, making it hard to follow the simplest of plays...
...The left-fielder, when not obscured by the foul pole, is the only player who is easily recognizable...
...It's not just because of the team's newly restored glory...
...SEAN WILENTZ 144 • DISSENT...
...During the years when theYankees were truly bad, I got through the middle innings of some awful Sunday games mainly by taking in that old and unchanging view...
...One of the truest, for me, has to do with a sense of place—not only the generic pleasures of hanging around an emerald ball field, but the specific pleasures of returning to the same grand stadium, with its view beyond the bleachers of the Bronx County Court House and the tenements and the el-line—pretty much the same view as when Joe DiMaggio played center field...
...But there is also a reassuring sense of continuity, in a city where almost nothing lasts...
...What's more, the tickets guaranteed that my friend and I could purchase seats for all playoff and World Series games at the Stadium, should the Yankees advance to postseason play...
...Not for every game on the schedule, but for all the Sunday afternoons, plus Opening Day and a few other holiday games...
...This season, there was a lot more to enjoy...
...Not only were the Yankees good, they were amazingly lucky...
...And so, there I was, on a chilly night in late October, not in my regular seat (which I imagine went to some corporate mogul), but in the ballpark nonetheless, with James hugging me, his excitement in baseball revived, straining to watch the final out of the Series recorded—and then cheering a championship that we'd never come close to cheering before...
...We saw some excellent Yankee players, including Don Mattingly (his favorite) and Rickey Henderson (mine...
...As wonderful as this moment is, there are bound to be hard times again, when the old surroundings would be as encouraging as ever...
...The cycle of high hopes and ultimate disappointments repeated itself over the next few seasons, and my friend moved to California— but I kept re-ordering the tickets and introduced James to baseball and the Bronx...
...As theYankees pranced around celebrating, I caught a glimpse, from my lousy seat, of the el rumbling by in the distance, and I thought of what a crime it will be if, as looks likely, the Yankees one day abandon this place...
...There's some escapist fantasy to this, no doubt, screening out the Bronx's sorrows and dangers...
...and James, like many boys of his generation, began preferring basketball to baseball, leaving me to attend the games with others...
...We were there because of a long-ago good turn...
...For a couple of hundred bucks, I'd at least get out of the house regularly all summer long, enjoy the sunshine, and, maybe, cheer up...
...Never before has whim—freak plays, fan interference, bad calls by the umpires— operated so regularly and decisively on behalf of a cause that I supported...
...In 1985, at a time when my spirits were low, a concerned friend got me to split the price for two upper-deck, box-seat season tickets to the Stadium, right behind home plate...
...I did cheer up, even though the Yankees, a talented team that year, just missed making the playoffs...
...We made new friends, as the same people turned up in the rows around us, Sunday after Sunday, year after year...
...But even if our seats were lousy, this was the World Series, and my son James and I were in the park...
...Somehow, it kept me cheered up...
...But I'd become a real fan...
...Most of the highbrow clichés about loving baseball—about the democracy of fandom, or about the game's singular narrative quality— are true enough...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
