this post is a season send-off for my main men

my yankee, brett gardner

I am in a period of mourning.  Sunday was the last day of the Yankees season. Thursday was the last home game.  I had what felt like many solitary nights and weekends this past spring and summer, and I will tell you, from much firsthand experience, that the YES announcers make spectacular company.

Baseball is my favorite background sound, for cooking, for eating, for doing crunches (**I do crunches!**), for driving.  From April to September, one is forgiven the need to have plans.  Essentially every night, no matter who you’re not seeing, who you wish you were seeing, or who you're trying not to see, you have companionship for 9 innings. 

There is something about the deliberate, measured structure of baseball, the way the strikes and the outs come in threes, the way each pitch, each inning, and each game amounts to a greater sum, that makes the sport downright therapeutic.  It is boring, even.  Like this blog.  A nerd's game, much of the time more about numbers and organization than actual physical fitness or athletic prowess.

On Thursday, Bennett and I said good-bye.  We took the crowded 4 train into the Bronx. We piled out with everyone else, and without everyone else stopped at the grocery store for peanuts and gummy bears. We scalped two seats for twenty bucks on 161st.  We bought Budweiser in the stands and littered peanut shells on the people in front of us and exchanged glances with the Dad sitting near us as we spiked our coke.  I ordered a hot dog and watched as it was amiably passed through 8 pairs of hands before reaching my mouth. We limply did the YMCA before the seventh inning and were solemnly quiet for God Bless America and yelled "YANKEES" in place of "home team" during Take Me Out to the Ball Game. We were on our feet for the entirety of the 8th inning and watched while Mariano Rivera threw his last four outs ever and sobbed into Andy Pettite's shoulder. It's like no one told Frank Sinatra that we lost 0-4; we were sung insouciantly out of the stadium. 

The end of baseball means it's really the end of summer. There are already no fresh stats to compulsively check on the MLB At Bat app, from bed first thing in the morning, or the bar late at night, or my office during the 2:00 lull.  Long drives up and down I-95 will feel longer without the company of John and Susan on AM 880, mindlessly interrupting each other with updates on the Jeterian swing and Suzuki's milestones. On Sunday, there won't be a beer cracked at 1:05pm, just because the baseball game is starting (well, ok, there might be, but not because the baseball game is starting, so it won't taste as good).  Six months without the chance to make a last minute decision after work to take the green 4 train up to the greenest borough and lazily spend three hours with 40,000 other New Yorkers, in suits and pinstripes and even, brazenly, A-Rod jerseys.

If you are not a baseball fan, but if you like warm feelings and good writing, this old essay from the Sunday Review written by Colum McCann might get your mind changed in time for next year. He talks a lot about why baseball is an immigrant's game, which doesn't apply to me at all, but he also does a way better job than I just did at explaining what it does for the soul.

until april (and hopefully before, but jeez, having a blog is a lot of work),

fran