In the Ninth

On Sunday I went to see the Yankees play the Detroit Tigers. It was a throwback to the Yankees teams of my childhood, with Andy Pettitte on the mound, cap still low, glowering. I’ve always been (and always will be) a Met fan, which is its own portion of anxiety, and the Yankees glittered out there in the Bronx, Pettitte and Jeter and company so much more put together and reliable than the Mets. A note on the gigantic screen in center field informed us that Pettitte had pitched for the Yankees in his twenties, thirties, and forties. My friend sitting next to me noted that you could hardly see what the score was—the numbers were that inconspicuous—though the advertising, of course, dwarfed it all.

Strangest was watching Alex Rodriguez play, a man who has been so under the popular microscope recently for performance-enhancing drug use as to have articles considering his upbringing. Who thought that steroids were still a discussion? That felt like years ago too. Rodriguez is facing the longest nonlifetime ban in baseball history. But for some time, during this purgatory, until the appeals process wraps up, he’ll be playing nine innings a day in the Bronx and the other cities that this itinerant fourth-place circus travels to. My friend mentioned, as Rodriguez took the field for the first time, that he thought he remembered something about Rodriguez saying how he couldn’t hear the boos in the crowd these days, because they were mixed with so much cheering. Read More »