"Refuse to Lose"

September 25, 2007 By

The 1994 baseball season was possibly the worst ever for any baseball fan. The players’ strike ended the season on August 12, canceling 938 games and all of the postseason. It spilled over into 1995, shortening that season by 18 games, and decimating the fan base. Clubs had some of their worst opening day attendance in history, and at Shea, two fans ran on to the field and threw wads of dollar bills at the players. Many wondered whether fans would ever come back, or had the greed of the players, owners, and umpires turned them off of baseball for good.

As a whole, I didn’t really care. Baseball was just an entertainment for me. And while I missed not having a postseason to watch in October, I certainly didn’t take it personally. I continued to watch the Mariners on TV (I was living in Portland at the time), and even made it up to the King Dome every month or so to take in a game. By the time August rolled around, I was seeing something I had never seen before: a wild card race.

The Mariners were about 12 games out in the middle of August, something that in prior years would have had them looking at rebuilding for next season. But this year, there was room for a few more teams in the playoffs, and Lou Piniella thought the M’s had a shot at the wild card. I had more faith, and one day in late August, walked into my friend’s office and wrote the number 38 on his dry-erase board.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The Mariner’s magic number.”

“But they’re, like, 10 games out. You don’t get a magic number if you’re not in first place.”

“The Mariners do.”

Every time the Mariners won or the Angels lost I went into his office and reduced the number. When it was in the single digits, my friend started to believe. The last week of the season, we took a day off, drove to Seattle and watched the Mariners beat the Angels. At the end of the season, the M’s and the Angels were tied, and the Yankees had snuck in and taken the wildcard. There was a one-game playoff, and the M’s trounced the Angels 9-1, including an error-filled inside-the-park grand slam for Luis Sojo, possibly the slowest man ever to hit an ITP homerun. In the end, the Mariners won 25 of their last 36 games, seemingly all of them in come from behind victories. The M’s would face the Yankees in the first ever, best-of-5, American League Division Series.

The first two games were in the Bronx, and the Yanks took them both, including the 15-inning marathon that was game two. When they came back to Seattle, I expected to see maybe one or two games before the Yankees ended the M’s season. In fact, I sort of hoped the Bombers would end it quickly so I could escape with a full wallet. I was still working in an entry-level job, and the $700 I had to lay out for all of the playoff tickets was more than I could afford.

Game three was good, but not particularly exceptional. Randy Johnson had pitched in the playoff game against the Angels, so he had to sit out games one and two. Since he was on the mound, everybody expected that the M’s would win game three, then the Yanks would finish them off in game four. Though it was the first time I had seen Johnson pitch, the only true image I have from the game is Don Mattingly striking out all three times he faced Johnson. The M’s won, 7-4.

About 7:00 pm Saturday, October 7th, I was confident the Mariners’ season was over. The Yankees were leading 5-0 and the M’s had nothing in the bullpen. Miraculously, they closed the gap. With the score tied at 6 apiece in the bottom of the eighth and the bases loaded, Edgar Martinez stepped up to the plate. Grand Slam. The only one I have ever, or probably will ever see in person. One of the images etched in my brain is of the ball hitting the curtain in centerfield and the triangle-ripple it made when it hit. I still think I heard the sound of the hard ball hitting the nylon tarp, but I know I could not have possibly, with 57,000 people screaming in my ear. The other image is Adam Arkin (then starring in “Northern Exposure”), sitting a few rows in front of me, holding his fists over his head as the Mariner Moose walked by and yelling “Moooose!! Moooose!!”

The next day, when I walked into the Kingdome, I thought there was no real way the M’s could beat Yankee pitcher David Cone, but they had come this far, and anything could happen.

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Flirting with Legend

September 19, 2007 By

There are several items on my list that were accomplished before I created the list proper. These were things that I had done before the summer of 2005 that I thought were essential, things that I had long wanted to do before I did them, and felt were truly special and important moments in my life. Some, like living in New York, are seminal. Others, like the one I will be describing in the next few posts, were just terrifically exciting to do, though not perhaps very life-changing. At any rate, here’s one from the archives, so to speak.

When I was in college in the Bay Area in the late 80′s and early 90′s, a friend of mine worked the scoreboard for the San Francisco Giants, and the instant replay for the Oakland A’s. That time and place was a great place to be for a baseball fan. The A’s were in the World Series in ’88, ’89, and ’90, winning in 1989 against the Giants in what has been called the Earthquake Series. Though I had liked baseball most of my life, it was during this time, when I saw more games than I could possibly count, that I became a true fan.

One evening in the summer of 1990, a friend of mine who lived down the hall poked his head into my room.

“I’m going to the A’s game tonight. Wanna come?”

“Who are they playing?”

“Rangers.”

The Rangers at the time, had one of my all-time favorite players. “Who’s pitching?” I asked.

“Nolan Ryan.”

Shit.

I had made a tentative date with a woman, who was going to call me when she got off work around 10pm. As this was the era before mobile phones, I couldn’t get in touch with her, and I had little chance of making it back in time for her phone call.

“I’m going to have to pass,” I said, with my chin on my chest. “I have a date.”

A few hours later, the woman not having called yet, my friend boldly walked into my room, and announced:

“Nolan Ryan. No hitter. Me. There. You. Here.”

Ten minutes later the woman called.

During the season of 1991, I worked with a guy who was best friends with Rickey Henderson in high-school. Whenever he couldn’t use the tickets Rickey gave him, he passed them along to me. In April of that year, Henderson was closing in on Lou Brock’s all time stolen base record. I went to the game right after the one in which he tied the record, but he didn’t steal a base the day I went. I couldn’t get tickets for the following game on May 1st, when he stole number 939, passing Brock for good. (Oddly, this was the same night Ryan pitched his record-breaking seventh no-hitter.)

The next day at work, I saw Rickey’s friend, and all he said was, “You must’ve been there, because you didn’t call me for any tickets.” I sadly shook my head.

“What were you thinking?” he asked. “You have my pager number. Rickey gave me 25 tickets to give to whoever I wanted, and I had two extra! Right behind the dugout! After the game, Rickey jumped on top of the dugout, pointed at the whole line of 25 seats, and said to the security guy, ‘All these people are coming to the locker room with me.’ We hung out and drank champagne with the team in the clubhouse!”

Even now, over 15 years later, I can barely talk about it without a little rage welling up inside me.

Two chances in under a year to do something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, #27 – Attend a legendary baseball game. I blew them both.

But, during the 1995 season, the year after the strike and the first year of wildcard play, I would have my shot at redemption.

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Life in a New City

September 16, 2007 By

We lived together in Brooklyn for about two weeks, but before I came out, I told S that if I was going to live in New York, I wanted to live in Manhattan, and she found a small apartment on the Upper West Side. The first weekend of November, my 14 boxes arrived, and S hired some movers to transport her stuff from Cobble Hill. We were both used to a lot more space, and not sharing it with anyone, but after a few months we adapted.

Life was very different on the East Coast. I had lived in Los Angeles, Portland, and the Bay Area, so I knew what living in a city was like. What I wasn’t prepared for was the difference between the two coasts. In Portland, drivers only honked their horns if there was imminent danger, and even then it seemed a little rude. In New York, it was rude not to honk if you noticed something holding up traffic for everyone else. The first time I felt like a New Yorker was the day, a few months after moving here, that a horn honked and I looked, not at the person honking, but at the idiot who was making the other driver honk.

New Yorkers will never admit they’re wrong. I’ve seen guys come to blows, even after it was obvious that one of them was wrong, knew it, and was defending a ludicrous position to the point of physical harm. I once nearly got hit by a bus while crossing with the light. I clearly had the right of way, and there was even a sign that stated turning traffic must yield to pedestrians. When I backed up a step to stop from getting crushed under the wheels of the bus, the driver stopped, opened the door and started yelling at me to watch where I was going. When I called him a jackass, and pointed at the sign and the crosswalk signal, he said that buses in New York always have the right of way. This is utterly a load of shit, and I told him so, and when I asked for his route number, he told me to fuck off, closed the door, and drove away. (About a year later, I saw the aftermath of an accident where a man was struck and killed on the very same corner, and couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same bus driver, and was I partly responsible for not having reported him.)

For some things, though, New Yorkers get a bad rap. While they may not be especially friendly, they are incredibly helpful. They won’t smile while they’re doing it, but they’ll help you if you need to find something or figure something out on the street. Sometimes they even stop and offer help without being asked. As a contrast, when I lived in the Bay Area, it was fairly common practice to “help” tourists by pointing them in the opposite direction of where they were looking to go.

The first time I was in Central Park, before I lived here, I got turned around and couldn’t tell east from west. I was holding a map and apparently looked confused. A guy walked up to me and asked, “Where you wanna go?” I told him where, he pointed to it on my map, and then showed me how to get there. He never smiled, and never once appeared happy to be helping me. He seemed slightly annoyed that he felt obligated to help me.

A few years later, after I’d been living hear for about 3 years, I was walking out of the subway, and noticed a German couple struggling to get through the floor-to-ceiling turnstiles. I remembered the first time I tried to go through one of them, and lost $2 because I stepped to the wrong spot and it didn’t turn far enough to get me through. I just watched the same thing happen to the man, as his wife stood helplessly on the inside, having already made it through. He tried to swipe again, but apparently had an unlimited card, and it wouldn’t let him use the same card again for another 20 minutes. I stepped out of the turnstiles,walked over to where he was standing, and swiped my card. I pointed at the spot where he was supposed to walk through, and somewhat curtly said, “There.” He walked through and I just walked away. As I reached the sidewalk, it occurred to me that I had done exactly what a New Yorker would have done; I helped them, but treated them like idiots.

New Yorkers also have a really extraordinary opinion of themselves, for no other reason than that they’re New Yorkers. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve heard someone say, when asked how they handled a particular inconvenience (transit strike, subways closed due to flooding, severe weather), “Hey, I’m a New Yorker. I can handle anything.” What they are really saying is that through it all, when inefficiencies in the system, other people’s greed, or centuries old infrastructure, cause serious inconvenience, rather than complaining about it or trying to fix it, they just get in line with the other sheep and let the system grind them down.

During the transit strike of December 2005, I began to understand it. That the transit workers would choose this time to shut everything down was truly reprehensible. It was freezing cold, snow and ice on the ground, and the week before Christmas, prime tourist season. That they chose this week, was probably no coincidence, as they “proved” how important their services are. Admirably, most New Yorkers still made their way to work through it all, with the same attitude they always do. While I was walking the 60 or so blocks to one of my clients, huddling against the icy wind, I found myself thinking more than once, “Yeah, fuck these guys. I’ll do this for months if it means they don’t get an extra dime.” Walking through the freezing city was my own personal protest against those things I couldn’t control. On the third day of the strike, my mother called to ask me how it was going and how I was dealing with the strike. I told her, “I’m a New Yorker. I can handle it.”

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Moving to New York City

September 14, 2007 By

When I was a kid, around 10 years old, and living in Portland, my mother had a co-worker who would join us for dinner every couple of weeks. Mark was, at the time, a youngish man who had some interesting ideas about life. One of the things I remember him saying was that everyone should live in New York City for at least two years. While he had yet to do so, he thought that living in a major metropolis should be a part of any well-lived life.

This idea stuck in my head. Through my teen years, through college, and into adulthood, there was a part of me that longed to live in Manhattan.

S and I met in college, dated for a few years, and then lost touch. 4 years ago, we were both back in Berkeley, and re-kindled the old flame. Unfortunately, I was living in Portland, and she was living in New York. I was working on a massive ERP implementation, and work in her field was scarce in Portland, so the idea of either of us moving was out of the question. We dated for two years this way, she flying out nearly every month (she was working freelance), and me flying out to New York about twice a year.

A few months before my project ended, I was fortunate enough to have an interview with a small consulting firm. After being offered the job in late September, I put in my notice, and left my old job 1 month after the ERP project went live. I sold about 90% of my books, gave all of my household stuff away to friends and the Salvation Army, and packed what was left of my life into 14 boxes and a suitcase. On October 22, 2003, I boarded a red-eye flight to JFK, and was on my way to fulfilling #9 – Live in New York City.

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