Originally published June 25, 1995, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
Part of living here all your life means you spend the summer with one eye on the New York Yankees. You don’t even have to be a big baseball fan to pray, root and hope that the Bronx Bombers crash and burn before the All Star break.
It is healthy to hate them. It is cathartic to depise the team as well as the owner and by the way, we may as well loathe the whole city while we’re at it.
What other town has metal detectors at communion rails? Or daycare curriculums where youngsters learn how to avoid stepping on victim outlines chalked throughout their playgrounds?
Where else would a lunatic lawyer like C. Vernon Mason constantly get his name in the paper? He is Mike Tyson’s attorney, and a few days ago he spoke at a Harlem Welcome Home rally for the heavyweight rapist and accused the media naturally of exaggerating his client’s crime.
“Do you all hear about the woman in South Carolina who drove her children into the river and drowned them?” Mason screamed. “Well, Mike Tyson didn’t do that. Do you hear about the bomb that was dropped on the building in Oklahoma City? Mike Tyson didn’t do that.
“Did you all remember Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate all the people and put them in a refrigerator? Mike Tyson didn’t do that, either.”
Ah, New York, New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Even with an IQ of 12. It’s a very special place, filled with some very special people. It’s the kind of place where the New York Post can conduct one of those instant polls trying to determine how its “readers” feel about the fact that Dr. Henry Foster will not be allowed to dress like a bellhop and serve as the nation’s surgeon general. The results: 40 percent said they were disappointed, 15 percent said they were happy, and 35 percent said, “Gimme 5 bucks for crack.”
But it is the Yankees who bind us together in unified contempt. It is the Yankees who truly bring out New England’s historic inferiority complex. Who cares that Manhattan has taller buildings, better restaurants and more sleazeball bond brokers? Who cares that their Italian mayor can pronounce difficult phrases like “Good morning” better than our Italian mayor? Our guy has better hair and an ego that isn’t nearly as out of control as the crazed Giuliani.
It doesn’t matter that New York leads the league in homicide and high school teachers marrying their students. People aren’t bothered that New York has more nuts, fruitcakes and total degenerates than anywhere else.
Ever since Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold The Babe for cash to produce “No No Nanette,” people here have had a fixation with every club that ever played in The House that Ruth Built. And this year’s edition is no different.
So, as the Olde Towne Team lost one in the mist to Baltimore Friday, the real bummer was that the Yankees beat Toronto. You see, we don’t live in the AL East simply to win a division; all we want to do is finish ahead of the swines of Steinbrenner.
And now we have an extraspecial reason to excel: His name is Darryl Strawberry.
Darryl represents everything bad about baseball today. He is a convicted criminal, a drug abuser, a cheat, a jerk, a clown, a mental midget, a liar and now, a New York Yankee.
There is something deeply flawed within the best game ever invented when Pete Rose is out of the Hall of Fame while Darryl Strawberry is in right field for the Bronx Bombers. It is ludicrous as well as sad.
His new employer and fellow felon George Steinbrenner just signed The Straw to a contract paying the player a minimum of $850,000 for the remainder of the summer. What a wonderful example for all the boys and girls who still think life is on the level.
The Boss claims he wanted to help poor Strawberry, give him a second chance, when this is actually about the 10th shot the fool has been granted. Outside Yankee Stadium, the Grand Concourse is loaded with those who get no chance at all, people who grow up more dangerous than dynamite because they are smart enough to see that too much of life looks like a dead end and you might as well do as you please because even if you get caught, the consequences rarely equal the crime.
Steinbrenner and Strawberry are a perfect matched pair for The Big Town: lawbreakers with a special contempt for rules and the kind of behavior ordinary people struggle to oblige.
Steinbrenner may have wanted a right fielder, but he went out and got an accomplice instead. In any event, these two blowhards are two more reasons to wake each morning asking, “How’d New York do last night?”
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