The Futility Infielder

Bring Us Your Finest Grilled Meats

Those of us who gather under the warm pink glow of the Chow Mein sign in Manhattan's East Village to watch the Yankees annual playoff run are a quirky lot. Since the 1998 season, my friends and I have assembled in some combination or other to share in the excitement and the tedium of modern-day postseason baseball, to cheer the Yankees and share the accompanying suffering which awaits us in those times we've got nothing to cheer for (fortunately, there haven't been too many of those).

Along the way, we've honed our routines and developed various superstitions. Lucky t-shirts and replica jerseys, rally caps, brands of beer, you name it, we've tried it. For example, my pal Nick always brings over several bags of David's sunflower seeds; no other brand will suffice. Nick munches on the seeds nonstop throughout the games. I, as my own personal logic dictates, only partake in the seeds when the Yankees are at bat, and then only if I feel the necessity for a rally. This formula, we have found, works very well.

I am, as my readers may have noticed, a firm proponent of rally totems, both at home and at the ballpark. To that effort, I introduced the Rally Beer™ concept to the general masses back in June (as if any of us needed an extra reason to reach for a cold one), and once I did, the American League East race was never the same. At times, I've even encouraged other people's children to sit in specific seats to keep the Yankee mojo working.

The Yanks' just-completed AL Championship Series with the Mariners found my friends and I searching for new combinations of the right stuff. At the same time, we were on the lookout for objects and habits to act as scapegoats. On Saturday, my girlfriend innocently bought a bag of unsalted peanuts from the downstairs deli. When all hell broke loose and the Mariners exploded for nine runs over the next two innings, I began having my doubts about the peanuts. And when the score went from 9-2 to 14-3 after we turned the game off, I knew that the peanuts, not the suddenly awakened Mariner bats, were the cause of the Yanks' defeat. So the nuts went. My poor, puzzled girlfriend, a rookie in our October gatherings, endured a very curt explanation about the hard facts of autumn in relation to her chosen snack. Fortunately, she understood.

Sometimes, thinkgs get silly. On Sunday night, amid the world's sloppiest pitching duel ever, between Roger Clemens and Paul Abbott, Nick reached an absurd and spectacular level of desperation. He spent two innings wearing a black plastic bag (the very same one from my just-procured Rally Beer™, actually) tied around his head as an ad-hoc rally cap. When that didn't work, he resorted--I shit you not--to an attempted headstand which lasted all of one minute. Skeptics may guffaw (I know several of us in the apartment did so). But it's worth noting that the next time the batter for whom Nick stood on his head, Bernie Williams, came to bat, Williams tied the game with a solo home run. Coincidence? I think not. Even my brother, decidely not a Yankees fan, refused to cast aspersion on such a ridiculous display: "You gotta do what you gotta do," he said.

In the afterglow of Alfonso Soriano's game-winning home run on Sunday night, I issued a decree that had as much to do with the Yanks closing out the series the next night as did Lou Piniella's choice of starting pitchers. With the chance of victory imminent, tomorrow night's dinner, I announced, would be grilled pork chops from our favorite Vietnamese takeout joint, New Saigon. Laugh all you want, but the pork chops have history on their side. Last year, during the first-round series against Oakland, with the Yanks having lost Game 1, we ordered the very same pork chops and were rewarded with a 4-0 shutout, courtesy of Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. When that series came back to a do-or-die Game 5, the Yanks' starting pitcher and our choice of meals were the same. The Yanks scored six runs in the first inning, and though Pettitte faltered in the fourth, the Yankee bullpen, inspired by our choice of cuisine, held off the A's to take the series.

When an ailing Roger Clemens took the mound for Game 5 in this year's series with Oakland, we knew the Yanks would need all the help they could get. Once again, pork chops were in order. End result? Yanks win. So it made sense that we would again be dining on New Saigon's finest grilled meats when the appropriate time presented itself, and in the jubilation of Sunday night, Monday's menu seemed obvious. It worked yet again, as the Yanks trounced the Mariners 9-3 to take the series, four games to one.

Now, I'm sure some of you out there are snickering. Why would someone (like myself, and to some extent my friends as well) who spends so much time trying to rationally analyze a baseball game resort to such superstitions? There's no simple answer. The human tendency to resort to myth and superstition in the face of powers we don't understand is older than organized religion, so ten thousand years of human culture obviously plays a part. As does the near-interminable length of playoff games--with thirty-second pauses every time Chuck Knoblauch steps out of the box to undo and redo the velcro on his batting gloves, we have plenty of time to tend to our oral and manual fixations. And occasionally, like with Nick's headstands, those of us who spend so many tense hours huddled together throughout these games simply need something to break the tension and get us laughing again, reminding us that this is all supposed to be FUN.

Even the Boss, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, gets into the act. During Sunday's game. Steinbrenner excused himself from the company of Reggie Jackson, Mr. October himself, to return to his lucky spot, where he was standing when Reggie hit three home runs against the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series. The results--Williams' and Soriano's home runs--speak for themselves. And that's not even exploring the superstition behind Steinbrenner's chosen attire of turtleneck and blazer for such affairs.

The Yankees recent playoff success, to some extent, defies rational analysis anyway. Facing two teams which were supposedly superior on paper--the brash A's with their 102 wins, and the Seattle Mariners with their record-setting 116 wins--the Yanks dismantled their opposition with conviction, and the aid of little extra mojo as well. Sojo Mojo, to be exact--what else could explain the reason for Joe Torre including the veteran futility infielder Luis Sojo on his postseason roster at the expense of an extra pinch-hitter like Nick Johnson. Opposing managers Art Howe and Lou Piniella made bold predictions of Yankee doom, but it was Sojo's brash prediction of Yankee victory that held up (an aside: my favorite scene from the Seattle series was Sojo and fellow Yankee subs Clay Bellinger, Enrique Wilson, and Shane Spencer singing along to "Y.M.C.A"--the song played over the P.A. at Yankee Stadium during the fifth inning of Game 5 while the grounds crew raked the infield--complete with hand gestures. Priceless).

Twenty-three seasons of watching baseball have proven to me that even with fancy formulas and expert analyses at hand, we simply can't explain everything that happens on the baseball diamond. Some of it--Mariano Rivera's postseason prowess, Tony Battista's batting stance, Leo Mazzone's rocking motion on the Atlanta Braves' bench, and the perpetual presence of not one but two pathologically mediocre players named Brian Hunter, for example--simply defies both logic and random chance. There's more between home plate and deepest centerfield than is dreamt of in our philosophies. Drama, magic, clutch performance. And the seeds.