The Baseball Desert

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Back to reality

I'm back, after a short week's vacation up in the mountains. The weather wasn't great - more clouds and rain than sunshine - but it was great to get away from Paris for a while and to be able to get up in the morning and not worry about having to go to work. Don't get me wrong: I like my job, much more than a bunch of other jobs I've done, but I also like not having to do it occasionally...

I went pretty much a full week without any Internet access / baseball scores, so I guess my actions on firing up the computer speaking volumes about my subconscious baseball interests and affinities. I was away for six days, and thirty baseball teams played something like a hundred games over that period, but when I logged on to MLB.com, the first thing I did - with apologies to those fans of other teams who are reading this - was check out the respective performances and of the Yankees and the Red Sox.

I guess it's like an old flame that you just can't let go of - you spend time away and think that things might have changed, but when you end up in a room with a bunch of other people, you only have eyes for that one person. I wouldn't classify myself as a fan of either team (although I will admit to having a soft spot for the Red Sox), but I think this shows how much the Sox-Yankees rivalry can mark 'fans of the game'. There's a lot of good stuff going on elsewhere in the majors - Scott Kazmir pitching in, and winning, his major league debut, the Angels and the A's slugging it out in the AL West - and some ugly stuff too, such as the sky falling in on the Indians, but what provides a rhythm to this English baseball fan's summer is the eternal struggle between those two East Coast rivals.

So, what's the state of play? Well, it was nice to see that the Red Sox had made up ground on the Yankees: they were 5 1/2 games back when I logged on yesterday and 6 1/2 games back as of this morning, thanks to Ted Lilly's stellar 13-strikeout shutout and Gary Sheffield's clutch home run. Yankee fans are still happy about the 6 1/2-game lead, whilst Red Sox Nation still believes...

The one down-side to all this is that thoughts of the rivaly and the possibly huge matchups that could be in store in September (I know, it's a big "could", but as I said, I lean more towards the Sox than the Yanks....) make the fact that I am unlikely to be able to go to the Sep 19 game I have tickets for a touch bittersweet. Before I'm inundated with generous requests to take the tix off my hands I should add that because it's an international order, I need to pick them up at the "Will Call" window at Yankee Stadium, armed with the credit card I used to make the purchase, so the end result is that two upper-deck seats will be unoccupied on that Sunday afternoon. For the fourth straight year I have tickets to a ballgame I won't see. Just for the record, I had tickets to Sox-Yankees in 2001, Sox-Yankees in 2002, Twins-Yankees in 2003 and Sox-Yankees this year. Some of you might notice a trend here, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: I don't know which came first - my interest in the rivalry or the tickets to the games. Anyway, the upshot is that I have adpoted that "Keep the Faith" billboard as my new motto - not my faith in the Red Sox' ability to overcome their deficit (and the Yankees), but my belief that one day I will finally get to see a game of major league baseball. Failing that, I guess I could write to Guinness World Records and see if I can't get included with my new "Number Of Red Sox-Yankees Tickets Bought Without Ever Managing To Set Foot In Yankee Stadium" record...

Oh, just one other thing: if on that Sunday afternoon I hear Michael Kay or any of the other YES announcers say "It's a beautiful day here in the Bronx and there isn't an empty seat in the house", I swear that you will be able to hear me yelling from 4,000 miles away. You have been warned.