Always a Yankee?
A lifetime of being a fan, with apologies to Mr. Boone
At the end, in the hospital, my father didn’t know what was happening to him or why he couldn’t go home.
He frowned at the gauze wrapped around his hands, tugged at the tubing running up his leg and pushed off the cannula feeding oxygen into his nose.
He knew only that he wanted to go home and sleep in the “big bed,” his king sized bed at home, with my mother, as he had done for the last 60 years.
And yet two things remained in his mind with unflinching clarity.
- Aaron Boone is the worst.
- Joe DiMaggio was the best.
Born and bred a Yankee fan in Astoria, Queens, by his father who served as the barber to many city baseball greats — Yankees, Dodgers and Giants — in the last few baseball seasons of his life, my father turned against them.
He was always a volatile fan, but never fair weather. He’d bitch and moan (to use his own words), but all true Yankee fans know it ain’t over til it’s over and he would root til the very last out. Yet, after years of yelling at Boone, the manager, on TV for every single one of his bad decisions (according to Joe Albanese, those were plentiful) he simply gave up. He would wave his hands, grimace and complain so much that it became easier, I guess, to prove himself right when they lost.
But he kept watching.
“They’re not going anywhere this year,” he told my mother.
Hmm. Last week, they clinched the American League East pennant, their first since 2019 and then the ALDS.
I can only now wonder what my father would think of this. Would he be happy? Or would he simply predict an early exit in the playoffs?
When I was a kid, Yankee news could send me into all-consuming fits of joy, anger or sadness. There was nothing better than beating the Red Sox or the Dodgers and nothing worse than losing to them. If I went to bed before the 9th inning (often, except when mom wasn’t home and dad let me stay up late), I raced to get to the Daily News before he did in the morning, to flip to the back page for the score. The heartbreak I felt reading they’d lost to the Dodgers in the 1981 World Series is still palpable. I had gone to bed praying they would pull it out.
Almost as bad were trades of my favorite players, and I got so angry at one, I ripped up my Billy Martin manager card (which I later regretted and still have the pieces haphazardly taped back together). And yes, the defining moment for Yankee fans of a certain age, I remember every detail of the day Thurman Munson died in a plane crash. I remember this more vividly than the birth of my children. (Sorry, kids.) Finally, even though I was a high school freshman at the time, the day my hero Lou Piniella announced his retirement, I was inconsolable.
So not only could I understand my father’s love-hate relationship with the Yankees, I am certain I inherited it. If you do it right, being a fan is a deep emotional commitment.
He taught me how to be a devout one, taking me to a couple of games every year with my grandfather, uncle and cousin and always to Old Timers Day to see Joe D. take a bow.
I loved going to the stadium, but the walk from the car terrified me. We parked in the lot at the nearby Bronx County Jail because it was cheapest. The prisoners would scream out the windows at fans streaming by. But I was with my father and he was 6-foot-2, loud and strong. Baseball glove on one hand, I held his hand with the other.
At home, we watched games religiously, and Sundays had a religion all their own. First church, then to the basement to flick on WPIX for the weekly Abbott and Costello movie at 11:30 a.m. and then the familiar voices of Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer ushered in the Yankee game at 1 p.m., which would usually be interrupted by my mother’s call for Sunday dinner of spaghetti and meatballs around 3 p.m. If we were out at the pool for the day, I would listen on our Toot-a-loop radio.
When I was 8, I played baseball (plastic bat, super pinkie ball) on my lawn with my best friend while wearing my communion dress. Around this time, my goal in life was to become the first girl to play for the Yankees. No one — not my father or my mother — ever told me I couldn’t.
My father dutifully drove me to my Little League games, volunteered to rake the fields, later sat through my high school games (mostly losses), took me to meet my favorite players — and once, Joe D. himself — at local autograph sessions and of course, to Lou Piniella Day at the stadium.
But I could never hit the fastball, so instead, my life’s pursuit turned to sports writing.
So even though I can’t recite the starting lineup like I used to, being a Yankee fan became the foundation upon which the rest of my life was built.
Being a fan is nirvana when your team wins, but when they don’t, it teaches you about loyalty, love and loss. And it stays in your gut the rest of your life.
Even at the end, when you think you would rather see them lose.
Hospital minutes drag on for hours, and the days I was there with my dad, I would count down those minutes until that night’s game, as would my mother and brother on their shifts.
When you’re a fan watching your team, you’re outside of yourself and that was where my dad needed to be.
As we waited, I thought about the last game we went to together. It was 8 years ago, my dad, me and my sons. I drove us to the Bronx, helped my dad up and down the stairs of the upper deck and went in search of hot dogs and pretzels. (The prison had long since been demolished.)
I did for him that day what he had done for me all those years.
That game would be the last one he would attend in person.
And now here we were, in my dad’s ninth inning.
When I was very little, I was afraid of alligators under my bed. Every night, my father would turn on the hall light, come into my room and sweep them away with his long arms.
At the end, in the hospital, he was tormented by unseen alligators, shaking and afraid of things only he could see.
I did the only thing I could.
I flicked on the game so he could yell at Aaron Boone.
