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I knew that baseball loyalty was generational, not geographic. You don’t choose your team; you inherit it.
He gave thirty-eight thousand city workers, including librarians, garbage collectors, firemen, and cops, the ax.
Washington was the nation’s capital, Philadelphia the birthplace of its independence, but when it came time to commemorate the country’s 200th birthday, no one even gave it a second thought: New York would be the center of the action.
Sitting next to Ty Cobb at a banquet in San Francisco, Martin told the dyspeptic old-timer that if he had played during his era, Cobb would have come sliding into second spikes high on him only once: “After that, you wouldn’t have had any teeth.”
the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America, one of the last living links to the country’s founding fathers, the New York Post.
Reggie Jackson was the second player chosen in the 1966 draft. He might well have gone first, his coach at ASU informed him, had the New York Mets not been put off by a line in his scouting report that said he had a white girlfriend. Instead, the Mets took a catcher named Steve Chilcott, who injured his shoulder and never made it off the farm, leaving Jackson to Charlie Finley,
He worked every day with A’s hitting coach Joe DiMaggio,
“I will not demoralize this club over Jackson,” said M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets.
She’d started her congressional tenure by offending the House doorkeeper—when he asked her to remove her ubiquitous hat before stepping onto the floor, she’d reportedly told him to go fuck himself-and then moved on to the president.
“You know, this team … it all flows from me,” he told Ward. “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson … but really he doesn’t enter into it … I’ve overheard him talking about me … I’ll hear him telling some other writer that he wants it to be known that he’s the captain of the team … And when anybody knocks me, he’ll laugh real loud so I can hear it … I’m a leader, and I can’t lie down … but ‘leader’ isn’t the right word … it’s a matter of PRESENCE … Let me put it this way: No team I am on will ever be humiliated the way the Yankees were by
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Reggie tried to even the score. “There goes Rivers in five years,” he said, pointing out the window at the driver of a passing truck. “Yeah,” Rivers replied, “but at least I’ll be happy driving a truck.” “Listen to me,” scoffed Reggie. “Arguing with a guy who can’t read and write.” “Better stop fuckin’ readin’ and writin’ and start fuckin’ hittin’,” said Rivers.
“Mets fan reaction was so outraged,” Paul Good wrote a few months later in Sport magazine, “that one might have imagined that Washington had traded Jimmy Carter for Idi Amin, even up.”
Sandwiched between the arrival of AIDS on New York’s shores during the 1976 bicentennial celebrations and the first reported cases of the virus in 1978, 1977 was the last great year of unprotected, nonreproductive sex in the city.
She was born Bella Savitzky in 1920, the year women got the vote, and grew up in a South Bronx railroad flat. She struck her first blow for feminism at age thirteen, when her father died and she flouted the rules of her family’s Orthodox synagogue by reciting the Kaddish—the Jewish prayer of mourning reserved for sons, not daughters—before school every morning.
There were two ways to explain New York’s ongoing fiscal crisis. According to one, the banks were the villains. Rather than stand by the city as it grappled with the loss of manufacturing jobs, they had panicked and abruptly dumped all their New York City bonds on an unsuspecting market. Under the other explanation, the labor unions were the bad guys. They had strong-armed City Hall into concession after concession until the public sector payroll was finally so bloated that it broke New York’s financial back.
“Instead of comfort, what New York received in the first days after the disaster was often the punitive judgment that it had just got what it deserved, considering the kind of place it was.”
One of the new editors, Peter Michelmore, asked veteran reporter George Arzt about the ethnicity of the staff. “We’re mostly Jewish,” Arzt replied. “I haven’t met many Jews,” said Michelmore. “We were always taught that they had horns on their head.” “Mine are retractable,” answered Arzt.
Mayor Beame, who had been awakened in Gracie Mansion minutes after the arrest, was waiting upstairs for Berkowitz to enter the building. When he did, the mayor rushed down to congratulate the arresting officer. Mistaking Berkowitz for a detective, Beame moved toward the killer and tried to shake his manacled hands. “The photo op from hell,” as the mayor’s press secretary, Sid Frigand, later described it.
(“We cannot afford to do nothing as we wait to do everything,” as Cuomo had put it.)
In later years Koch told and retold the story of Stanley Geller, the head of his former political club, the Village Independent Democrats, calling to dress him down in the heat of the Forest Hills flap. Koch insisted that the project would destroy the neighborhood; Geller replied that the Jews of Forest Hills had to pay their dues. “Stanley,” Koch answered, “you have this wonderful brownstone on 12th Street … And you have this marvelous home in the Hamptons … On the day your kids were born, you registered them in private schools. And you’re telling me that the Jews of Forest Hills have to pay
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ONLY Babe Ruth had hit three home runs in a single World Series game (twice, in fact), but never in consecutive at bats, let alone on three pitches.
