For 19 years now, I've been in love with baseball. Being a Mets fan, I don't know how much I can say baseball has loved me back, but nothing makes my heart race every spring like the crack of the bat, the stolen base, the green of the outfield and the sweet smack of a fastball in the catcher's mitt.
That said, one of the greatest games I've ever seen was anything but spring-like, and even though I'll always remember it, for most baseball fans, it's probably a forgotten game.
That Memorial Day afternoon, going to a ballgame was the last thing on my mind, especially since it was raining in biblical proportions. The sky was black and the wind tore thick sheets of rain in 50 different directions, just pounding everything in sight. It was such an anti-baseball day that when my friend Matt called at noon to ask if I wanted to go to the one o'clock Yankees-Red Sox game, I asked him three times if he was serious.
Apparently, our friend Dave had an extra ticket to the game and the Yankees didn't want to cancel it because it was Roger Clemens's first shot at 300 career wins, and the rain was supposed to let up. I had never seen Clemens - a living legend and future hall-of-famer - pitch live before and I had never been to Yankee Stadium, so I said yes.
For the entire car ride, I was torn. As a fan of the game, this was a chance to be there for a milestone, the 300th win for one of the greatest pitchers of all time. A potential eyewitness to history, it would be cool to see Clemens win. As a Mets fan, however, I couldn't bring myself to root for the Yankees, and I especially couldn't root for Clemens, whom I respected as an athlete and a ballplayer, but didn't have much respect for otherwise.
Soon after we got to our seats behind the Red Sox dugout, I had the answer to my dilemma.
It was already the bottom of the fourth inning and the Yankees were losing 5-1. As we sat down though, a Yankee hit and a Red Sox error made it 5-3, and the Yankees fans came to life.
Remember, this was my first time in Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruth Built. And for an anti-Yankees fan like myself, walking through that turnstile meant crossing into enemy territory. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but sitting in Yankee Stadium, until that very moment, was something I had only imagined. And in my imagination, Yankee Stadium wasn't only filled with the aura of baseball legends, heroes and 26 World Series titles, but also the aura of arrogance, money, and everything about the Yankees and their fans that made me cringe.
Yet when I sat down, the Yankees were losing, the fans were defeatedly quiet, and the scene I had always pictured was a far gray and coldly wet cry from anything nostalgically baseball.
So when the Yanks tacked on those two runs as we sat down and the crowd stirred, I knew everything had suddenly changed. These were the Yankees. They were destined to come back and win. Beating Boston was their civil right, and the worst part was that all the Yankees fans around me knew it, sitting smugly as their team pulled within two runs.
The next inning, I finally got to see Clemens, who struck out the heart of Boston's lineup - three up, three down - and strode off the mound as advertised.
As I watched Clemens walk back into the dugout and the fans around me rise to their feet cheering, I decided some things were stronger than baseball lore and history. Root for the Yankees? Root for Clemens? Not a chance.
That was the closest I ever came to rooting for the Yankees, and that day it was also the closest the Yankees got to the Red Sox. In the top of the sixth inning, Boston knocked Clemens off his horse and slammed home three more runs. Suddenly, it was 8-3 Red Sox, Clemens was pulled from the game and the 300th win slipped away, like rain into the city sewer.
When popular writer David Halberstam wrote about the late intellectual and baseball enthusiast Stephen Jay Gould, he told the following story. Gould is at a ballgame with his editor, and Clemens - an all-star on top of his game - is pitching a gem. Taking in the beauty of the baseball scene in front of him and turning to the crowd, Gould shows his scorecard to his editor -which reads eight innings, 11 strikeouts, and two hits - and says, as if overjoyed, "Isn't this wonderful!"
And so I remember the time I saw Roger Clemens pitch at Yankee Stadium. The weather was awful, the crowd was deflated, the home team lost, the aura was far from magical. And I look at my own scorecard, which looks nothing like Gould's: five and two-thirds innings pitched, 10 hits, eight earned runs.
Ah, baseball. Isn't it wonderful!
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
