THE cruelest part of a pitiless day was the sunshine, and the blue sky, and the temperature that edged toward 80 degrees for what will surely be one of the final days of the year. Most times, in the dying hours of September, we welcome this visceral reminder of summer.
Just not this time. Just not on this day, the ninth day of autumn according to the calendar, the first day of winter according to our local baseball sun dial. Baseball season was over before September was, for the first time since 1994.
Back then, it was over everywhere else, too, because of the baseball strike, and so it was almost easier to take, since everyone hated baseball in September of 1994, since baseball had become Public Enemy No. 1.
Fourteen years later, there is none of that bile, just a hazy cloud of regret settling over the city, a miasma of melancholy.
“Look at how nice it is outside,” a Mets fan named Scott Gibbons said yesterday afternoon, standing outside the Shea Diamond Club, with an autograph book in his hand, an old-school Mets cap on his head and a hole in his baseball heart the size of the Central Park reservoir. “It should be against the law not to have a game here today.”
No game here today. No game on the Bronx side of the Triboro, baseball’s Bridge to Nowhere in this Gotham-free October. For the first time since people were still wondering if “ER” would outlast “Chicago Hope,” the rest of baseball has outlasted New York City.
What a terrible truth to spoil a beautiful day for baseball.
“Something has to change,” Omar Minaya was saying inside the old Jets’ locker room at Shea Stadium. “We have to figure out a way where we don’t have to have everything riding on Game 162 next year.”
Minaya had to raise his voice every few minutes because it was hard to hear what he was saying. Outside, in the corridors, dollies were being pushed and wood was being sawed and boxes were being taped, the sounds of a demolished season and a doomed stadium colliding.
“It’s hard to believe this happened again.”
And hard to believe that elsewhere in this baseball nation, in places like Philadelphia and St. Petersburg and Chicago, other stadium workers were engaging in other stadium projects, painting logos onto fields and tidying up visiting clubhouses and building temporary stands.
In Los Angeles and Milwaukee and Anaheim, ticker orders were being filled and travel itineraries completed. In Boston . . .
“Man,” a Yankees fan named Jose Ayala said outside Yankee Stadium, “I can’t stop thinking that Boston is going to be in October and we aren’t. Something’s wrong, man. Something’s just not right.”
Ayala said he was an anomaly among the baseball populace in New York, a Yankees fan who this weekend was rooting like hell for the Mets because, he said, “we all live in the same city.”
“I remember 2001, all my friends who were Mets fans were rooting for the Yankees, and I never forgot what that was like, having the whole city behind one team. I wanted more baseball in town, I didn’t want it all to end.”
Instead, that is what so many of our baseball citizens are left with, Yankees fans rejoicing in a second straight Mets collapse, Mets fans taking solace in the fact that once Yankees fans are done gloating, they have nothing to look forward to until Legends Field in February.
That give-and-take between Yankees fans and Mets fans lights up the summer, keeps the city crackling between April and September. And is supposed to heat up like a pizza oven in October.
Just not this October, this quiet October, the only one where we’ll have four baseball stadiums standing in our boroughs, close to 200,000 seats gleaming under the autumn sun, and not one reason to fill even one of them.
Four baseball stadiums, two baseball teams, zero playoff baseball games, the most awful arithmetic available.
Next Year arrived too soon this time around. Way, way too soon.