Anyone but them
Fall Classic a New Yorker’s nightmare
WE CAN pretend that none of this bothers us even a little bit. We can act as if we’re too sophisticated to be so sophomoric about being bitter. We can assert that we will not watch one inning of the World Series, starting Friday night, so who cares who’s playing in it? But who are we kidding? This World Series is, simply put, the worst possible matchup in the history of the World Series as far as New York is concerned. And, yes, the World Series goes back to 1903, so there should have been others. But go on. Look at the list. Tell me one that more infuriated the baseball sensibilities of New York City’s ball fans more than this one. The Astros versus the Phillies? Or, spoken in a vernacular we are all more comfortable with: the [expletive, deleted] Phillies against the [every expletive in the
English language, deleted] Astros?
Are you [bonus expletive, deleted] kidding me?
“If hate were people, I’d be China!”
— Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) to his soon-to-be-exwife, “City Slickers” There have been other Series that infuriated either half of New York’s great baseball divide. In 1986, the Mets played the Red Sox in the World Series and there were Yankees fans who refused to watch television during that entire 10-day torture gauntlet. There were some who refused to read the newspapers.
George Steinbrenner was sporting enough to write a daily column for The Post during that Series, and by the end, he was so far gone watching these two detestable teams play that he was quoting the 19th Century American poet William Wetmore Story: “I sing the hymn of the conquered, who fall in the battle of life/The hymn of the wounded, the beaten, who died overwhelmed in the strife.”
Yeah. That was a tough 10 days for Yankees fans. But no more difficult than 2009 was for Mets fans, who had to endure six games over the span of eight days involving the Yankees and the Phillies, which, as Dennis Miller once said, is like having to choose between airplane food and hospital food.
Before that series, I asked my old high school pal Eddie Burns, a rabid Mets fan, which team he was rooting for.
“Rain,” he said. “Lots and lots and lots of rain.”
But, see, that’s the thing about a divided baseball city: even those awful matchups were only awful to half the town. There was nothing unifying about that. But Astros versus Phillies? There’s a little something to despise about this for just about everyone, isn’t there?
“Hate cannot drive out hate.
Only love can do that.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. All due respect, Dr. King was not a Yankees fan in a time of Astros cheating. Nor was he a Mets fan, having seen 101 wins up close, now watching from a distance as an 87-win Phillies team prances and dances all over the National League playoffs.
The Yankees’ hatred of the Astros was at a low and simmering boil through playoff defeats in 2015, 2017, 2019. It wasn’t long after the stomach-churning setback in 2019 that anger turned to fury when we all learned about the trash cans, and it has now become a full-blown rage. Even a feel-good story like Dusty Baker can’t assuage that wrath. And last week’s sweep just added more kerosene to the incinerator.
The Mets and Phillies lived in mostly benign diffidence until 2007, when the Mets gagged away a 7 ½-game lead with 17 games to go and watched the Phillies become, across the next few years, the dominant team in the NL East, a perch the Mets believed was rightly theirs. Everything changed the following winter when Cole Hamels called the Mets “choke artists,” and now that the Phillies have again stolen what Mets fans believed was rightly theirs …
Yeah. For once we have a United Baseball New York. Everyone has the same rooting interest: rain (or maybe ruin?). Houston now is what New York always aspires to be: king of the baseball mountain. And Philadelphia? Look, that one isn’t just baseball. Ask a Giants fan about the Eagles. Ask a Rangers fan about the Flyers. Ask one of your Wall Street buddies about the “Philly World Series Win Indicator,” and he’ll remind you that the only time Philly wins the World Series is in times of financial crisis — 2008, 1980, even 1929 and 1930, when the old Philly A’s won just before and right in the teeth of the Great Depression. So this World Series won’t just make you mad.
Now it’s trying to go after your 401(k), too.
[Expletive, deleted.]