Put a clock in it

Look, I firmly believe in the rule that the best umpire is the one that you don’t notice, much like they way breathing and digestion is supposed to work. So I can’t abide by Joe West spouting off about the length of Yankees-Red Sox games. It’s all fine and dandy to say what you want when you retire, a la Ron Luciano, may he rest in peace, of The Umpire Strikes Back fame. But not while you’re still an active ump.

That said, the man has a valid point when he called the interminable length of Yankees-Red Sox games “a disgrace to baseball” and “pathetic and embarrassing” in a story in The (Bergen) Record. He’s correct, yet as the Daily News’ Hall of Fame columnist Bill Madden put it, “he just isn’t the one to be saying it.”

Other than Yankees-Red Sox fans — who, as God is my witness, deserve each other until the end of time in the worst possible way that could be defined — the fuck is a 9-inning ballgame doing lasting almost four hours? Don’t get me wrong: I like the leisurely pace of baseball. I love the way a game ebbs and flows, the way tension builds and subsides depending upon the critical pitcher-batter matchups. And I dig that baseball doesn’t have a clock.

Except that it once did. Sort of.

Confessions of a lapsed Yankee Fan

Like my upbringing in the Catholic Church, my Yankee fandom runs deep.

My first visit to the Stadium was on Catfish Hunter Day in 1979 (when the Yankees brought an elephant onto the field). I remember seeing games several times with my departed and beloved grandfather, once getting doused with mustard from a girl smirking devilishly from the upper deck (and fellow fans yelling, “Go get her, Dick Tracy” to the stadium cops).

The author in Esquire, circa 1998

I once appeared shirtless from behind (no, it’s not pretty, but you can’t miss me) in the bleachers in a photo spread in Esquire magazine. In June 2001, my father and I watched a game from the loge seats (and, I should add, the Stadium’s Burns Security denied us pre-game access to an overcrowded Monument Park).

And my wife and I were engaged, on July 1, 2001, before a game in that very same Monument Park, with me dropping to my knee next to the small garden the grounds crew tended at the edge of the park (yes, I also paid to have a message appear on the scoreboard in the middle of the fifth inning, with my sauced friends, secreted in another part of the Stadium, nearly forgetting to snap a photo before the message disappeared). My future wife and I arrived at 10 a.m. for a 1 p.m. game, my experience with my father two weeks earlier giving me the necessary knowledge to arrive extra early if we were to gain access to the retired numbers beyond left-center field. Needless to say, my nerves that morning led her to suspect something was up. She accepted (twice), despite my mother’s half-hearted tongue-in-cheek (I think) “warnings” to her.

So that is why it pains me, in a young season of an ugly, overbuilt new Yankee Stadium run by tone-deaf Chief Operating Officer Lonn Trost, a Stadium that bulldozed a neighborhood park (h/t George Vecsey) for the benefit of those that can afford $2,500-seats and be surrounded by a moat (h/t Deadspin, and no, my opinion has not changed because the Yankees relented ever-so-slightly and let fans come down into the front row in the outfield for batting practice), a season of steroid admissions and allegations, a season with bombastic television and radio announcers, that I am prepared to renounce my Yankee fandom, at least for a year’s exile, or a year’s self-flagellating penance (there’s that Catholic guilt influence) or whatever you want to call it.

You can’t call me a traitor or a deserter. Truth is, the Yankees have deserted the likes of me.

The Yankees of this generation engender equal parts fierce loyalty (sadly, of sometimes over-muscled meathead variety) and exasperation, and that’s not even counting banning beer sales in the bleachers at the “old” Stadium under the watchful eyes of the Stadium’s toughs.

What I hereby publicly announce is nothing novel. My 70-something neighbor gave up a lifetime of rooting for the Yankees 16 games into the 1985 season when George Steinbrenner unceremoniously fired Yogi Berra through an intermediary. My neighbor switched his allegiance right then and there to the dreaded Red Sox, and has been a fiery supporter of Boston ever since. Nearly 14 years later, Yogi came back into the Yankee fold. My neighbor never has.

My father is on the verge of a similar defection. Also a lifetime Yankee fan, who adored Mickey Mantle as a boy and whose TV room is adorned with black-and-white photos and memorabilia dedicated to No. 7 (much to my mother’s dismay), my father has all but renounced his lifelong Yankee fandom and turned himself over to the Bosox.

This does not negate either man’s memories or remove them as fans of the Yankees before their conversions — they still retain the right to cherish and proclaim their love of Yogi, Whitey and the Mick, much like I am still retaining my fond memories of Thurman, Nettles, Reggie, Gator, Goose, Sparky, Mattingly and David Wells, and I am still clinging to my scorn for Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, Jim Rice and Bill “Spaceman” Lee.