No One Mourns the Wicked (One Sixty-Two: Day 106)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day One Hundred-Six: Kevin Youkilis, Boston Red Sox

We’ve solved the mystery, although it took awhile. We know who planted a pair of red socks where they didn’t belong.

My parents have a metal sign hanging on the fence in their driveway reading “Yankee Fans Parking / Red Sox Fans Go Home.” Sometime during the week, an individual slapped a magnet on this sign. It was a pair of red socks – the unmistakable logo of Boston’s Red Sox.

No longer was it a lazy beach week; someone had declared war. Where will he strike next?

Tonight, my 8-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old cousin performed songs from the musical Wicked for the family, lip-synching to “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” with plenty of energy and emotional gravitas. While Katie and Megan have not seen Wicked on Broadway, they understand the theme to this story – that sometimes it’s hard in life to tell just who the evil people are around us. Is green-faced Elphaba the wicked witch we’ve always known her to be, or is perky Glinda the one with true wickedness inside her? Are there times when a person chooses a questionable path largely because of the ways she’s been mistreated by others? In that case, who’s the real wicked one?

Tonight they meet again: the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have begun a four-game series in the South Bronx with the Red Sox needing wins to keep their season alive. For years, the fans in New England have called New York the “Evil Empire” owing to the seemingly unlimited cash that the Yankees have to spend. But are the Yankees really the evil ones? After all, didn’t this whole string of 27 championships begin because Boston’s owner wanted to sell New York a guy named Babe Ruth? Was that the Yankees’ fault? And how can you blame the Yankees when Mike Torrez helped pitch them to a World Series title in 1977, but then switched to Boston the following year and gave up the division-clinching homer to New York’s Bucky Dent? Didn’t both teams have the guy, after all?

My brother and I didn’t spend our summers lip-synching to show tunes, as my girls have done this year. We were more the baseball and Star Wars-figure types. If we weren’t playing ball outside, we were probably creating stories with our Han Solos and Luke Skywalkers. Sometimes, we’d even mix the two, creating a baseball diamond on the living-room carpet and placing a Star Wars figure at each position. We’d use one of the Ewoks’ cannonballs for a ball, and create a semblance of baseball using Gamorrean guards and Cantina bar customers. Somehow, it all worked.

It was rare that a member of the Evil Empire wound up on top in our fictional ballgames. The guys with the force usually won out. And when we played our baseball games outside, it was always New York sending Boston home with a loss.

And yet, some 250 miles north, it was surely the opposite every day. From Connecticut to Maine, it was the Yankees who secured the Dark Side; those magnetic red socks were a sign of goodness and northeast-American unity.

So really, who’s the wicked one? And how should we feel about the guys on the other side? Should New York fans be cheering because Boston first baseman (and sometime Yankee antagonizer) Kevin Youkilis is out for the season with a torn muscle in his thumb? No one mourns the wicked, right?

Or should we feel sympathy for those on the other side, and search for a way to finally get along? After all, Darth Vader did come back to the Jedis in the end, right?

Yeah, but Elphaba didn’t get all Goodie Two Shoes up on her broom, even if Dorothy did do her in. Rivalries are too much fun to give up, whether you’re battling through ballgames, musicals or action figures.

Oh, and those mysterious magnetic socks? My niece, the one who played Glinda tonight, has a dad who likes to joke around. He confessed to planting the dreaded logo on my parents’ sign. It took days before he came forward, but we finally got his story.

So, Glinda, when you and your family drive home from your vacation tomorrow, look to the western sky as you pass through New York City. You’ll surely see a blimp up there somewhere, defying gravity in order to photograph Yankee Stadium for a nationally televised New York-Boston game. Who, you might ask, is the wicked one on that field?

It depends on how you read my parents’ driveway sign, I guess.

The Underappreciated Man: Tweet All About It (One Sixty-Two: Day 77)

Writer’s note: One Sixty-Two is a season-long series of blog posts connecting baseball’s major-league players to life’s universal themes. Just as there are 162 games in a season, so there will be 162 posts in this series. Let’s play some ball.

Day Seventy-Seven: Michael Young, Texas Rangers

This evening, we received news that Nick Swisher had been voted to the American League All-Star team in the increasingly popular fan vote to determine the final member of each league’s team. Swisher, who has a wildly popular Twitter account, spent part of this week actively promoting his cause via tweets. He edged out Boston’s Kevin Youkilis, who received a heavy dose of support from Red Sox Nation.

A little while later, ESPN broadcast the most-hyped free-agent signing announcement in the history of the world, in which LeBron James sat before Jim Gray, a group of youngsters and a VitaminWater vending machine to announce that he’ll be playing pro basketball for the Miami Heat this fall. LeBron’s announcement was broadcast via a one-hour special, which ESPN titled “The Decision.”

It was a day for self-promotion in sports. But what day isn’t? The potent combination of sports and electronic media in the 21st century has placed individual stars under the microscope more than ever before. Swisher and James, to their credit, seemed to be trying to maintain some humility in discussing their triumphs. But try as they may, they could not erase the fact that each had helped turn an event into a media frenzy.

Michael Young doesn’t do media frenzies. The Texas Rangers third baseman finished fourth in the American League fan vote, leaving him out of the midsummer classic for the first time since 2003. The Rangers certainly encouraged their fans to vote for Young. But the 33-year-old did not speak out on his own behalf.

And if anyone had a right to do so, it was this guy. No active major-league player has been as clutch in All-Star play as Michael Young, as he drove in the game-winning runs in both the 2006 and 2008 All-Star games. Young is a six-time All-Star, who at age 33 has more than 1,700 hits and a .302 career batting average. He rarely misses a game for Texas, and has agreed twice in his career to change positions when the Rangers asked. In 2004, he moved from second base to shortstop to accommodate Texas’s acquisition of Alfonso Soriano. Last year, months after winning a Gold Glove at shortstop, Young moved over to third to make room for the younger Elvis Andrus.

Humility may be hard to find in sports these days. But over in Arlington, Texas, the first-place Rangers have a healthy dose of it at third base. Michael Young may be the most underappreciated player of his generation. But he won’t tell you that. He won’t tweet it, either. Sometimes, just knowing for yourself is good enough.

Friends and Enemies

When I lived in Massachusetts, I used to go out for jogs wearing my Yankees cap backwards. That way, by the time the Red Sox fans noticed what I was wearing, I’d have passed them by already. We lived on the North Shore of Boston from 1999-2004, during the heart of the modern-day Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. My jogs through Salem and Marblehead may have shielded me from the Boston baseball fans, but other social interactions brought me face to face with the Fenway faithful.

Red Sox fans are not the type to hide their passions. By the turn of the century, Red Sox fans my age had spent their lives rooting desperately for men like Carl Yastrzemski, Dwight Evans, Mike Greenwell, Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn and Nomar Garciaparra. They had watched these men perform majestically, only to fall just short at the finish line or in the playoffs. And when a flamethrower named Pedro Martinez arrived in Boston with a glimmer in his eye and a championship in his sights, these fans began filling Fenway Park every day and night, no matter the month or the weather. They began, in some small way, to believe.

They were rooting for and believing in my least favorite team in baseball, and I watched their passion with no small measure of dread. I, like so many Yankees fans, had reveled in the fact that New York had won 26 titles since acquiring Babe Ruth from the Red Sox in 1920. I had come to see Boston’s annual autumn fade as a seasonal rite of passage, and as validation that I was on the right side of the greatest rivalry in sports.

But then I got to know large numbers of Red Sox fans. I worked alongside them in public schools, I worshiped beside them in the pews of my church, and I shopped alongside them in supermarkets and shopping malls. And as I met these people and talked with them, I found myself making genuine friendships with people who wore that Old English “B” on their heads. I found myself going out to eat with them, inviting them over my house, and even going on weekend vacations with them. And while we engaged in some trash-talking when it came to baseball, the rest of our time together was spent talking about other things – the kids we taught in school, or the kids we raised at home, or the world events around us.

It is late September in 2008, and the landscape of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry has changed dramatically since I moved back to the New York area in July of ’04. Three months after we moved, the Red Sox pulled off the greatest comeback in baseball history to defeat the Yankees for the league pennant, then went on to win their first title in 86 years. Three years later, Boston won the World Series again. This year, they’re on their way to yet another postseason. The Yankees and their vast history of success are taking a year off from postseason play in ’08, and they haven’t claimed a title in eight years.

I still keep in touch with several of my Red Sox-rooting friends. When we talk, I wish them the best and tell them their team is great. At 37, I have come to a place in life where my emotions are not guided by the successes and failures of baseball teams. I have reached a point where I can watch the Red Sox win a championship, and instead of feeling bitterness I can think with affection of the friends I know who are filled with joy at that moment.

I would still prefer that the Yankees be the ones winning, and I’ll still root for the other 28 teams over Boston any day. I still like to pick certain Red Sox players and envision them as evil incarnate (my current choice: Kevin Youkilis). But that’s just for fun. The Sox are a baseball team, and I don’t even know the players personally. The friends I have, however, are true and genuine. I know that. And I think there’s something pretty cool about them feeling some thrills when their favorite team wins.

So on we go, into another October. I’ll read about the Yankees’ plans for off-season moves. And, if the cheers from New England reach my ears, I’ll fire off another congratulatory e-mail to some delirious friends in red and blue.