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Yanks face Mets -- and memories

By BRUCE LOWITT

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 21, 2000

All over the country, millions of you are saying you don't care about an all-New York World Series. To which New York replies: "Yeah, so ... ?"

New York doesn't care what you think. It is the mecca of baseball, just as it was half a century ago when Brooklyn and the Bronx ruled the game.

And if you would prefer to watch Larry King or Addams Family Values instead of this Subway Series, that will be fine with us. We guess it must have been your parents watching As the World Turns 44 years ago when the Dodgers were playing the Yankees in Ebbets Field for the last time.

They played for the first time in 1941. Then, from 1947-56 the Dodgers played the Yankees six times. It could have -- should have -- been seven, but Bobby Thomson ... oh, never mind.

This World Series isn't just about the Yankees and Mets.

It is about Bill Bevens and Cookie Lavagetto, Joe DiMaggio and Al Gionfriddo, Yogi Berra and Sandy Amoros.

It is about the Yankees and the Dodgers.

The Brooklyn Dodgers.

And it is about payback.

It is about Tommy Henrich and Mickey Owen, Billy Martin and Jackie Robinson, Don Larsen and Dale Mitchell.

And about Brooklyn losing its identity when the Dodgers abandoned it after the 1957 season.

It is about a 43-year-old hole in the heart.

Try to think of the World Series as Mets and Yankees fans see it.

And by the way, if you think you or anyone else can root for the Mets and the Yankees, you're not a fan; you're a spectator. You don't really care. Forget about it.

Oh, not every native New Yorker or Brooklynite -- there is a difference -- says "fuggeddaboudit" or "toity-toid street" or "terlet." You've heard Joe Torre speak. The man is eloquent. The man is from Brooklyn. Not everyone in Bensonhurt, Flatbush and Canarsie is William Bendix or Tom D'Andrea.

There are Brooklyn Dodgers fans who have never let go of our love of the bandbox ballpark on Bedford Avenue, the Sym-Phony in Section 8, and Hilda Chester in the bleachers with her cowbell, and never let go of our dislike of Walter O'Malley, who eviscerated us in his pursuit of more money.

Dislike? Try hatred.

Brooklyn joke, circa 1958:

Q : If you were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O'Malley and you had a gun with only two bullets, who would you shoot?

A: O'Malley, twice.

And when the Dodgers left, we couldn't warm to the Yankees. The Dodgers were a neighborhood team. The Yankees were arrogance.

They were that condescending rich uncle you never liked to begin with, especially after he made those snide remarks to your parents about how some people's children would never amount to anything.

Yankees fans, no matter their age, believe in only one thing: divine right.

Mets fans under the age of, say, 40, have always been Mets fans because, for them, the Mets have always been there.

We Mets fans 50 and older believe in only one thing: reincarnation.

We are Mets fans because we loved the Brooklyn Dodgers (okay, some Mets fans loved the New York Giants), were devastated when they abandoned the city in 1958, and embraced the Mets when they were born in 1962. And how could we not? The Colt .45s (now the Astros) could fill their first roster with anyone they wanted; all Houston had going for it before 1962 was the Cubs' Triple-A farm team.

The Mets were competing with memories.

In their early years they signed former Brooklyn Dodgers Gil Hodges, Don Zimmer, Clem Labine, Duke Snider, Roger Craig, Charlie Neal, Billy Loes, Joe Pignatano. They also signed former New York Giants pitcher Johnny Antonelli (Willie Mays would come later) and ex-Yankees Ralph Terry, Gene Woodling and Yogi Berra. And in a brilliant stroke of public relations, they hired Casey Stengel to manage them. Casey had been fired by the Yankees in 1960 -- another reason to hate them.

... I know what I'm needing and I don't want to waste more time.

I'm in a New York state of mind.

-- Billy Joel, Turnstiles

New York is as much attitude as latitude and longitude. Humorist Jean Shepherd once explained that New York attitude -- a city staring gallantly out to sea, the rest of the country desperately hanging on to it by their fingernails.

So we have established that we don't care what everyone west of the Hudson River thinks. We know you will deny yourselves for just so long, then you'll watch these games but not admit to it.

In fact, you'll be proud of your indifference, as if you invented it.

You'll be missing something.

It may be great baseball.

It will be great theater.

Attitudes -- and mouths -- don't grow on trees, you know.

Not even in Brooklyn.

-- Bruce Lowitt was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and was 15 when he was eviscerated by Walter O'Malley. What remained of him moved to St. Petersburg in 1986, four months before the Mets won the World Series. He is in Brooklyn this weekend, watching.

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Gary Shelton