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This was Tuesday afternoon, inside an interview room in St. Petersburg, Fla. The Rangers had just halted the cute little miracle run of the Rays, and Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon was sitting behind a microphone. And he did something that, in certain precincts (such as ours) would be deemed unpardonable:
He hinted maybe the world hadn’t ended just because the baseball season had.
“I really want to commend our players,” Maddon said. “I just had a little toast with our guys. In the beginning of the season we began 0-6 and were getting on the first plane ride and I had a really nice bottle of whiskey, I gave everybody a cup, and at that time I saluted the best 0-6 team in the history baseball.
“You say some things — I say a lot of crazy things sometimes, but actually this one kind of came true. It is the best 0-6 team in history of baseball, and I am very proud of our guys.”
This was Friday afternoon, inside an interview room at Yankee Stadium, a few hours before the Tigers and the Yankees had at it in Game 5 of their American League Division Series, and Detroit manager Jim Leyland was sitting behind a microphone. And he did something that, in certain precincts (such as ours) would be deemed unthinkable:
He decided it would be a good time for a laugh. He told a story about a university professor and a proposed pitching strategy and it sounded like something out of the old Casey Stengel Encyclopedia of Non-Sequiturs, and he wrapped it all up with a straight face and a summary: “This will explain why you think I’m so old and grumpy and messed up.”
Do you remember when baseball — even October baseball — was this fun?
Do you remember when the journey was every bit as enjoyable as the destination, even if the destination sputtered short of a champagne shower and a motorcade? When did the act of being a Yankee — and rooting for the Yankees — become such a grim, joyless adventure?
Don’t you ever miss what it felt like in 1996, when the Yankees for the last time — maybe ever — endured what Pat Riley used to call the “innocent climb,” when they weren’t behemoths and bullies but rather a baseball team coming together and learning how to win?
Was it really so terrible to experience success in degrees?
Impossible as it is to remember, that 1996 team wasn’t even the highest-salaried team in its own division (Baltimore was) let alone baseball. The back-to-back-to-back champions of 1998-2000 somehow won more than 300 regular-season games (and, more important, 33 postseason games) without All-Stars at every position, with enough dirty-uniform guys that even as they piled up titles, they could still be considered gritty.
Those days, of course, are dead.
The Yankees started changing course after that title in 2000, started collecting stars and bloated contracts, passed those financial burdens on to you, and that’s where this all really starts, right? Forget the one championship in the last 11 years; if you want to root for the Yankees now it costs you. It’s a commitment to attend a game in May against the Athletics, let alone anything more meaningful. And customers who get gouged expect bang for their buck.
And look: It isn’t just fans. Honestly? The Yankees didn’t commit a horrific felony this season. They won 97 games. They played a very good series against a worthy opponent. The Tigers won their three games by a total of four runs. Whatever happened to tipping your cap to an adversary who just got the best of you?
Except this is what team president Randy Levine said to ESPN yesterday: “We are the Yankees. When you don’t win the World Series, it is a bitter disappointment and not a successful year.”
That is absurd, and beyond arrogant, and it’s why fans expect nothing short of yearly supremacy, an impossible goal. And it explains why yesterday there was such fury percolating on talk-radio, in email inboxes, all across New York. This is the sickness that befalls you when you brand yourself not only beyond reproach, but beyond failure in a game defined by it.
Maybe there never will be any going back. Maybe the happy faces of Maddon and Leyland belong, permanently, to other towns, and ours is forever the stony-faced visage of Joe Girardi, his face drained of joy the way a bloodless organization’s has.
Is that the price of relentless expectation? If so, it’s too high.