Looking Forward, Looking Back

     “Did you read the blog today?”  I was messing with Tony Sherry last night driving to the Stadium.  There’s no way he read it.  “I read it,” he insisted.  “Did you read it or did you skim it?”  “I read it……..I skimmed it………I skimmed the first half of it.”  There it was.  The Sherry brothers, as I’ve said many times before, have never been known for their patience.

        Bronx Johnny sent me a few text messages the past few days.  They all said the same thing.  “What’s up with your boy Posada?”  He’s trying to make nice.  I routinely tell him that he’s the biggest hater I have ever met in my life.  And he is.  I’ve known plenty of Met fans and Yankee fans who are haters, but Bronx Johnny is the worst I’ve ever seen.  A Met fan from the Bronx.  And I shred him about it all the time.  So now he’s trying to prove that he’s really not that bad after all.  Fine.  We’ll see this weekend if he can control himself.  He needs to take a page from Grossman, the official Met correspondent for the BPS. 

         Not a lot of runs today, boys.  Apparently Vincente Padilla is making the rules these days.  Since when does that tomato can hold us to two hits in six innings?  Putting aside the 14 run carnival on Tuesday night, we’ve scored a total of 15 runs in our other six games since the Lion went down.  That’s 2.5 runs a game, and that’s not going to cut it.  We should be eating Vincente Padilla with ketchup.  Before this series I said we were going to be lucky to split.  I think that’s what you would call it, being that we needed to erase a nine run deficit to pull it off.  It felt a little bigger than a split, though.  When you can accomplish something like that, it proves a whole lot of things about your team.  It gives you a window into what they are capable of.  Yes, there are some interesting angles to this DL situation the Yankees are facing.  This might teach the team how to win the hard way.  It’s easy to think of all the thunder coming up behind you, sometimes.  It would be easy for any Yankee to treat his at-bat like a kid in the schoolyard whose big brother is standing right behind him with brass knuckles and a rattlesnake draped over his shoulders.  Sometimes to be patient and scrap for that one run you need is the way to win.  Sometimes you’ll win because your team hits five home runs in one game.  When you get both of those things down tight, you’re playing what Umair and I like to call Championship Baseball.

         Happymeds asked recently about Mike Lupica (I think it was Happymeds).  Lupica was a favorite target of mine last year, and he’s always been a favorite verbal target of mine.  Lupica is your average whiny sports dork who couldn’t ever play but thinks he’s an expert regardless.  He’s an excellent writer, but he’s got a hatred of the Yankees that goes so deep that it affects his rationale, and with it his credibility.  Realizing that it would be ridiculous for him to say that New York is a “Met town,” he tries to back-door it by saying things like – “New York has always been a National League town.”  Give it a rest Mike.  The most credibility-damaging pieces he writes, though, are the pieces he inevitably writes around July or so each year that state that “the Mets are the better story in New York right now”.  You can count on that one every year for about the last ten years.  The Mets have been a marginally compelling team over the last ten years, at best.  Some years they have just been forgettably underachieving.  I wonder if he’s gone back over those columns at any point, or if he just tries to forget about them.  The Yankees over the last ten years have put together a dynasty run that has included multiple perfect games, a no hitter by an aging New York hero who recaptured glory for just one night, a Yankee as quirky as he was dominating such that he wore Babe Ruth’s hat out to pitch an inning before they made him take it off, and unbelievable comebacks on back-to-back nights in the World Series followed by a devastating disappointment.  It has seen the ultimate comeback to vanquish the ultimate rival, and a collapse for the ages.  This Yankee team is the story.  They have always been the story.  Pay attention, Mike.  Get over yourself, and deal with the Yanks.  They are the professional sports franchise. 

        So with that, what’s the most recent piece he’s written?  The one that lauded The Ferocious Lion for being the kind of guy who apologizes to his teammates and fans when he gets hurt.  For being the exact opposite of Barry Bonds.  Okay, so maybe Lupica gets it right once in a while.

      So I guess I have to s*ck up the fact that I got exactly one comment on the BPS today.  One.  Thank you, Lucky.  A goose-egg would have been devastating.  Okay, so two more have posted comments since I began here, Reid and Tony Sherry, of all people.  I’ll take it. 

        Last thing.  Since today is May 18th, I’ll recall the May 18th when the Yanks won two games in one day.  Not a doubleheader, mind you, but the kind where you win one after midnight the night before, and then you come back and win another one the next afternoon.  A beautiful night turned into a monsoon courtesy of Mother Nature, and a sure 13th inning loss turned into a win courtesy of a grand slam by Jason Giambi.  The boys were there in force.  Ten of us.  The next day’s win was far easier.  But there was another game in between.  A stickball game.  It took place in the schoolyard of St Teresa’s church in Staten Island at about 9:30 in the morning.  Mike Sherry was there, as was Sean, the Big Boy, Johnny Fantastic, Jim Slover, the Magic Man, and Mikey Rumble.  Funny thing about that game; we were all wearing tuxedos.   There were plenty of spectators there, too.  But they weren’t watching us.  They were waiting for the main event, when a pretty redhead would stride down a long aisle on the arm of a gentleman known to most everybody as Big Joe.  That was the star they all came to see.  And she disappointed no one.  Happy anniversary Mrs. B.