Copyright 2000 The Denver Post Corporation
The
Denver Post
July 9, 2000 Sunday 2D EDITION
SECTION: SPORTS; Pg. C-01
LENGTH: 1809 words
HEADLINE:
New Yorkers daffy about doubleheader
BYLINE: By John
Henderson, Denver Post Sports Writer,
BODY: NEW
YORK - It wasn't yet noon, and the plastic cooler guarded by the
preteen boy already had filled with empty Corona bottles and Coors
cans. The half-dozen men feeding out of it didn't really know each
other before they boarded the subway at Times Square. It didn't
matter. They formed their own brotherhood, randomly garbed in Mets
and Yankees gear and all entwined by the same New Joisey 'Sopranos'
twang and the occasional odd bodily function.
It was the ultimate John
Rocker nightmare: life on the No. 7 train. Two games. Two stadiums.
One day. One city. New York.
'It's the beauty and the beast, and right
here's the beast,' said Mike Stack, holding a Coors. 'You can't slay
the beast: the New York sports fan.' New York baseball made history
Saturday. No, the New York Mets didn't prove they're a better team
than the Yankees, getting swept by 4-2 scores, dropping them to 1-4
against the Yankees this year. In the ultimate nirvana for the rabid
New York baseball junkie, the Yankees and Mets played a Subway Series
doubleheader at Shea and Yankee stadiums.
It's not a first
unless you were around in 1903, when the New York Giants played
somebody called the Brooklyn Superbas, the precursor to the Dodgers,
at Brooklyn's Washington Park in the morning and the Polo Grounds in
the afternoon.
The Yankees-Mets series isn't even new. Interleague play,
in its fourth year, has watered down the novelty and the Yankees
and Mets are tired of the hype. But tell that to a New Yorker. We
dare youse.
'Mike Stanton thinks it's stupid,' Stack said of
the Yankees reliever, 'but Mike Stanton's a moron.'
New York
fans are not, Rocker be damned. They feed off the hype like vultures
on carrion. The New York Post devoted eight pages to Friday night's
series opener at Shea. The Saturday afternoon game drew 54,165 to
Shea and 55,821 to Yankee Stadium that night. A smart scalper could
have retired by the third inning. Hundreds of fans walked around Shea
holding fingers and signs up, desperate for tickets.
There
simply weren't any.
'This is the biggest rivalry in New York,' Stack
said. 'Rangers-Devils? Islanders-Rangers? Jets-Giants? Go cover
the Cubs-White Sox. Now that's a series. Kerry Wood against
Jim Parque. Yeah!'
It was hard to gauge Rocker's surly view
of the No. 7. Sure, as he lamented in Sports Illustrated last winter,
there were minorities, but no one took a survey of how many of the
mothers were single. And definitely no one knew who had AIDS.
Besides, the No. 7 was so jammed, Stack's gang was crammed into a
little corner of the car, humanity on one side, steel and beer on the
other.
So what do the No. 7 passengers think of the No. 7's critic?
'Rocker spoke the truth,' said Kevin Michael, hovering
over the beer cooler. 'I swear to God. You come here on a
weekday afternoon and you'll see what he's talking about. I can say
it and get away with it. He can't. How come Reggie White can talk
like that and Rocker can't?'
Michael, a 32-year-old warehouse
worker from Aveneo, N.J., wore a black Mets jersey and a Fu Manchu
moustache. He hated not having a ticket for Saturday night's game
just for missing the sadomasochistic pleasure of wearing his jersey
at Yankee Stadium's right-field bleachers, an act, which under New
York law, has been ruled grounds for justifiable homicide.
He
proudly boasted of wearing it before.
'Oh, yeah, I had problems,'
Michael said. 'I lasted four innings and security kicked me out. I
asked security why I was being kicked out, and they couldn't give me
a reason.'
('They saved his life,' whispered his friend.)
'I
went to the '98 World Series and sat in the right-field bleachers,'
Michael continued. 'I was a San Diego fan. The whole game they gave
me (bleep).'
'And they kicked him out after four innings,' his friend
said.
'No!' Michael protested. 'I lasted seven!'
Soon one of the
gang, who will remain nameless, stepped out the door between cars and
urinated out of the moving train. A young woman in the adjacent car
looked on in horror. The gang continued jawing. The topic of
discussion was Dwight Gooden, who in the first game made his return
to the Yankees.
It has been a rocky road, even in New York, for Gooden,
an ex-Met who battled drug suspensions before the Houston Astros
and Tampa Bay Devil Rays released him this year before the
Yankees saved him with a minor league contract. The Mets fans,
seeing blood with every pinstripe, are repulsed.
'He'll get a
standing O, then he's gone,' Michael said. 'Then it's, 'Want a bag?
Come over here.''
Shea finally came into view as the gang went off in
search of scalpers. Steve Campo, a 32-year-old salesman wearing a
Yankees T-shirt, did his ceremonial nose thumbing at the blue edifice
in Queens, a no-charm cookie cutter from the 1960s that has
always played the ugly sister in the shadow of Yankee
Stadium's Parthenon-like presence.
'This is the worst
stadium,' said Campo, shaking his head. 'When you walk in and see
that monument of Ed Kranepool? Now, that's a statement.'
A
Kranepool monument was nowhere in sight, but a Yankees fan did walk
by with a Yankees cap attached to a tall blue flag reading 'Mets
suck' on one side and 'Piazza is a (um, pansy)' on the other.
'I made it myself,' said James Townsend of Beacon, N.Y.
'Yankees fans high-five me. Mets fans tell me things you can't
print.'
Such as 'Dump the stupid hat, (bleep)!' from one passerby in
a Mets jersey.
On the more peaceful front, three brothers all
wore Yankees batting helmets with two wind-up subway cars revolving
around a miniature Yankee Stadium. Gary Peers, a Mets fan and their
friend, had an identical model only for Shea. Brian Asher invented
them and sells them for $ 20. There weren't many takers, but maybe
he drew interest Saturday night in the Bronx.
They were some
of the few who had tickets to both games, the nightcap of which
resulted from a June 11 rainout at Yankee Stadium. Logistically, it's
a cakewalk. They drove in from Huntington on Long Island and parked
at Shea, then took the 7 back to Manhattan.
'We're taking the
Rocker Express,' Asher said.
'You've got to get him off the tracks,
don't you?' Peers said.
'Oh, yeah,' Asher said. 'We tied him to the
tracks. Then we're taking the 7 and 4 to Yankee Stadium and 4 and 7
back here. We figure we'll be home by 2 in the morning.'
And
well worth the effort.
'It's the greatest thing to happen to New York
since 1903,' Peers said. 'It's a New York happening. It's a great New
York experience. Look around you. It's revitalized baseball. This
is what it's all about: rivalries.'
The afternoon game
started with the electricity left over from the Yankees' 2-1 win
Friday night. Mets manager Bobby Valentine got tossed after the first
pitch, and the Yankees scored two first-inning runs. Then the game
went shockingly quiet. Gooden and Mets starter Bobby Jones looked
great and the Yankees, as usual, played smarter and won 4-2. The
loudest cheer came when Yankees fans, who filled about 20 percent of
the seats, erupted after Tino Martinez's solo homer in the sixth.
The media outnumbered Yankees in their clubhouse about
4-1. Shortstop Derek Jeter was asked if he's tired of the hype.
'You guys tired of writing about it?' he snapped. 'You
guys build it up, build it up. It seems like we play the Mets
every other weekend.'
Meanwhile, the Mets didn't even bother
undressing. They ate at Shea's Stadium Club and climbed aboard a bus
in full uniform for the drive to the Bronx.
'This is like
American Legion again,' said Glendon Rusch, the Mets' starter in the
nightcap. One difference, however. Rusch's Legion team never got a
police escort as the Yankees and Mets did.
The 7 train back to Manhattan
was a skeleton of its former self two hours after the game. Times
Square, however, was jammed. Fans in pinstripes and blue and orange
pushed into the No. 4 train uptown to the Bronx as if trying to
escape a fire.
Dave Fox, a Mets fan from Coram, N.Y., swapped swigs from
a bottle of Cressi wine ('$ 4.25 a bottle, you can't beat it,'
he said) with a friend. The wine came in especially handy on a
steamy non-air conditioned train that was the perfect environment
for African violets. Not that anyone noticed. Or cared.
It
was Game 2 and chants of 'Let's go, Mets! Let's go, Mets!' filled the
car.
'If you're a New Yorker and at tonight's game, nothing else
in the world matters,' Fox said. 'This is it.'
Yes, Fox and
friends wore their Mets garb in right field. He has before and is
alive to talk about it. Actually, Mets fans say the
Bleacher
Creatures aren't the sub-human species they're depicted. Bob
Huhssler of Hamden, Conn., took his son to a Red Sox game Fenway Park
last year.
'He wore a Bernard Gilkey jersey and heard about Gilkey
and 'Go back to New York,' all night,' said Huhssler, sitting with
his son. 'They're a lot harder-edged there.'
An hour and 15
minutes after leaving Shea, the No. 4 train pulled up next to Yankee
Stadium. If you didn't have a ticket you didn't get in. Fans were
desperate; scalpers were scarce. Tim Smith of Clinton, N.J., stood
with two fingers in the air for an hour. Only four people approached.
Police were everywhere.
In fact, one undercover cop in floppy shorts and
a spiked haircut wrote up a ticket on a perplexed fan with too many
tickets in his pocket. Smith looked for tickets in the
right-field bleachers and didn't find one until after the game
started.
'I sit with all the
Bleacher Creatures,' Smith
said. 'It's a small gang, about 30 of us, and we look out for each
other. The Mets fans don't have any problems. But if they step over
the line, the
Bleacher Creatures will get physical.'
It's a grim lot, the
Bleacher Creatures. Many wore blue
and orange 'Mets Suck' T-shirts and never hesitate to drill a Met
even after their pitchers do. In the second inning, Yankees
starter Roger Clemens' 93-mph fastball hit Piazza right in the
helmet. As Piazza lay nearly motionless in the dirt, the
Bleacher Creatures stood and, like a boxing referee,
gave Piazza the 10 count.
Then they counted him out in Spanish.
By midway through the game, however, no punches were
thrown. Score one for peaceful co-existence. At least for one day,
one doubleheader. All Saturday did, really was whet fans'
appetites for more.
As Jerry Asher put it best, 'We want a
real Subway Series, a World Series.'
Subway to Yankee Stadium
or Shea Stadium (map)
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Associated Press
New York Yankees and Mets fans travel to Yankee Stadium on the subway Saturday
for the second game of a cross-town doubleheader. Mets batter Mike Piazza gets
hit in the head by a pitch from Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens in the second
inning of Saturday night's game at Yankee Stadium. Piazza left the game. The
Mets said the hit was intentional. Above, New York Yankees fan Chris Ciccone,
left, talks with Mets fan Mark Damone, right, as Paul Brigandi, center, also a
Mets fan, looks on as they ride the No. 4 train through the Manhattan borough of
New York to Yankee Stadium. A true subway series was held Saturday with the day
game at Shea Stadium, followed by the night game at Yankee Stadium. Below, Marge
Zien of Manhattan holds a sign welcoming former Mets pitcher Dwight 'Doc' Gooden
back to Shea Stadium, although he is now with the Yankees. Gooden pitched five
solid innings in his return, earning the victory. The Denver Post Subway to
Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium (map)
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