Taking Him Out to the Ballgame

It was the worst day of my life.

My family had gathered en masse at a local restaurant to celebrate my father’s 65th birthday, and my nearly-five-year-old nephew Zachary, shy and coached by my younger brother Jon, approached and stood, staring, at my side. “Go ahead,” said my brother. “Tell Uncle Michael what you told me.”

“I like the Mets,” said Zachary, an evil smirk crossing his face.

I shared a stunned, exasperated look with Jon.

“How did this happen?” I asked, half expecting to wake up, screaming and sticky with sweat, from this nightmare. “Who would do this to a child?”

We decided that Zachary had been poisoned by a friend at camp or school, some other lemming led blindly into the abyss of broken-hearted fandom. We wanted better for our nephew. He had a photo of the 1998 Yankees, the best baseball team I’ve ever seen in the flesh, hanging above his bed. He’d been born into the promise of greatness, endless World Championships at his fingertips. We‘d envisioned a navy blue and white clad Zachary, posters of Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada papering his bedroom walls, driving down to the Canyon of Heroes with his friends to watch the latest version of the Yankees parade through the streets of lower Manhattan. We’d dreamed of him playing baseball for his high school team, the number “2” ironed to his back in tribute to his Yankee hero. We’d even had the audacity to picture him in pinstripes, patrolling the outfield at Yankee Stadium or, God help us, taking over at shortstop.

And now this.

If he’d said, “Uncle Michael, I like the Red Sox,” I’d have hurt less. The Mets were unacceptable. If he liked the Red Sox, at least we could laugh at him. With the Mets, all we’d have is pity.

We decided to take drastic action. It was time for Zachary’s first ball game. We were going to the Bronx.

And so it was that my older brother David, his wife Melissa, Zachary, his younger sister Emily, Jon and I ended up on 161st Street and River Avenue to watch the Yankees play the Devil Rays on a Saturday afternoon. Why the Devil Rays? We needed a win for this to work.

We put on the full court press: caps at the Yankee store, genuine ballpark hot dogs, cotton candy, jumbo pretzels, and of course, peanuts and Cracker Jacks.

After we put on his new Yankee cap, I pretended to mistake him for Jeter. “Holy cow,” I shouted, “It’s Derek Jeter!”

“No, it’s not, Uncle Michael,” he said, removing the cap to spoil the illusion. “It’s Zachary!” We were off to a smashing start.

Jon and I patiently explained the ins and outs of Yankeeland to him: the Bleacher Creatures and Roll Call, the unique call and response between the players and fans; the rousing, 5th-inning “YMCA” led by the grounds crew; the 7th-inning stretch, complete with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and Cotton Eye Joe.

Sometime in the middle innings (I was too delirious to remember which inning precisely), Zachary asked, “Are we winning?” We, not they. I was beside myself with glee.

When, apropos of nothing, he turned to me a short while later and said, “The Mets strike out,” I nearly had a stroke. It was working. There was hope.

As for the game, we couldn’t have asked for anything more: not one, but two Bernie Williams home runs to mark his 35th birthday, a dramatic, late-inning Yankee victory, and Mariano Rivera jogging in from the bullpen in the ninth to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

I sang along with Frank Sinatra as we walked, exhausted, through the tunnels of the Stadium and into the cool, late summer air. “Start spreading the news,” I sang, oblivious to the sneering onlookers. “I’m leaving today…”

Zachary was trudging along, holding his father’s hand, hat pulled down over his eyes, shoulders slumped. He wasn’t even paying attention to the show his uncle was putting on for his benefit. Right then, he was just a tired little boy with a whole mess of new sensations to sort out: the sounds and smells of the ballpark, the rules of the game, the attempted brainwashing. It was obvious he needed to sleep on all of this.

As we said goodbye in the shadow of a building in which Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle had played baseball, I took off his hat and mussed his hair. “So, that’s baseball,” I said. “What do you think?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “Are you coming home with us in our car?”

I milled around for a little while after they left. The subway platform is always mobbed after games anyway, and I had some things to sort out myself. Maybe baseball isn’t our national pastime anymore, but no one’s sitting around planning the perfect trip to Madison Square Garden or Giants Stadium. There’s something different about baseball, something that makes us want to take more care of it than other diversions. Do we speak of basketball with the same reverence? Do we worry about the way our football players “carry themselves” on the field? Baseball’s just different.

Maybe it won’t be the same for Zachary’s generation, the way it just hasn’t been the same for us as it was for our parents. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to pass on the joy of the Game. If he can’t appreciate the nuances until he’s older, and even if he never grabs hold of it the way I did, at least he’ll have that day, when his parents and his uncles took him to the ballpark to see the Yankees. The day Bernie hit two home runs on his birthday. The day he got his Yankee cap. The day he saw Derek Jeter for the first time.

Mission accomplished.

Mount Sinai Mosaic: Nov/Dec 2003