It's a free country (wait, let me check my watch and what's the latest emanating from D.C.). O.K., so yeah, let the pea brained idolaters of the automatons in pinstripes watch the reruns of past glories on the Yes (Yankees) cable channel and let 'em hope and plot for 2012. But mostly, let 'em learn, with each disappointment, some of the character building that may, I repeat, may come with more regularized losing and second best status. It's a long winter: let 'em ponder "what might have been" and maybe with enough richly deserved comeuppances like this sweet Tigers victory, they'll bother to at least take a peak in a Webster's at the meaning of the words "suffering" and "compassion." Oh, are you thinking dear reader, that I am supposed to bestow some of this rare commodity of saintliness connoted by the latter word upon these obnoxious folks to help "loin 'em" as they say in "Greenpernt?" "Where were they, in this regard, for all these many long years?", say we Cubs, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Giants fans. (though '10's afterglow may have not yet worn off on Jints folks and hence no fresh gall for them). Devotees of all these teams though, have long since earned their doctorates in Crucifixion-By-Loyalty, an interesting field of study of the modern masochist's yearning for love and salvation. And we needed no patronizing and phony condolences from the Yanks and their minions. Come to think of it, that's one of the very few virtues of a Yankees disciple, they give you no quarter (in more ways than one: notoriously chintzy are they…why be surprised?…ask any waiter or bellhop who had to deal with the patron saint of Yankeeism, Joltin' Joe The Vainest Schmo). Let the Cranky Yankees fans go to school and hit the books, long and hard.
Full disclosure: in 1955, with about three weeks of kindergarten experience under my belt (or beneath my metal snap-on suspenders) I watched as my Aunt Pauline thrilled to Johnny Podres' shutout and only World Series Championship clinching for his Brooklyn Dodgers. My Mom had traditionally turned on our old Dumont t.v. every October since '51 and she and my aunt both wearied of the predictable outcome nearly each year: "Yankees win." I knew I was a Dodgers fan on that long ago afternoon when they and my Dad caught the spirit (who can forget the Daily News' headline the next morning "WHO'S A BUM!" with the full page cartoon of Leo O'Mealia's beloved hobo) that ignited as much heavenly delirium in Flatbush and beyond as did V-J Day.
What made tonight's final curtain so particularly lovely was the memory tripped off by the uniform of the potbellied hurler with the eccentric body language on the mound against the final Yankee batter. In May 1959 I had fully discovered the happy mania of the game and all heroics of a non-Yankee nature. That particular season did not disappoint. Except for 1954, it was the only one of the decade of the '50s in which the Yankees failed to win the American league pennant (in fact they would win all five pennants of the first half of the '60s). Part of their frustrations (and one of the reasons for their third place finish that season) were the result of the exciting play of the Detroit Tigers with ace Frank Lary, "The Yankee Killer" and Charlie "Sunday Charlie" Maxwell, home run hitter par excellence. That Sunday in May, when Charlie slugged four homers consecutively against the despised Bombers in a doubleheader, was the occasion for an explosion of delight for a little rabid partisan like me. The twinge of disappointment four months later when the Go-Go Chicago White Sox captured their first pennant in forty years, nudging out the Tigers, was more than ameliorated by my beloved Bums' ascension to the top of the National league heap that year. Their conquest (as the L.A. Dodgers) of the Sox in the World Series was a happy reprise of '55 and a most delicious icing on the cake.
The zenith of exultation though, the very summit of King Of The Hill-ism, was the 1963 World Series in which the Dodgers came face to face against the Yanks for the first time since '56 (that terrible series in which Don Larsen's perfect game and a general collapse of Brooklyn's offense led to the Bombers' speedy revenge for '55's brief moment of paradise). In '63, there were no booming Brooklyn bats of the recent past to suddenly go cold (Snider, Campy, Furillo and Hodges) but these west coast Dodgers now had the fully developed talents of the matchless southpaw Sandy Koufax, the nearly equally awesome Don Drysdale and though relatively punchless, the remarkable speed of a resourceful team led by the ultimate master of mercurial locomotion: Maury Wills. The outcome? The Dodgers: World Champions in four straight games, Yankee bats muted along with their fans' flapping jaws and Nirvana for the Forces of Light. The Horace Clarke era of sustained Yankee mediocrity was only several years away (a truly wonderful period, much like the smashed landscape after the collapse of Rome, but without the barbarians holding sway). For the moment though, before the horror of Dallas one month later, Vietnam and all the other upheavals and assassinations of the next dozen years or so, there was that incomparable moment, at least in the world of baseball, when Goliath lay sprawled out flat on his back with David's rock lodged in the tyrannical ogre's skull and the underdog as gleeful overdog! Go Bums, go Sawx, go all liberators and liberated from Pinheaded Pinstripers (with apologies to Mr. Bill O'Reilly….unless he's a Yankees fan).
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