Baltimore needs more cheerleaders

Somewhere in the dusty storage rooms of the New Yorker building, exists a story told to me by my father.  From a 1940’s issue, it’s a fictional tale of when the Nazi’s attempted to take over New York.

In uniforms of the Wermacht and armed with machine guns, standing erect at subway entrances, the Nazi’s hoped to use fear to control New Yorkers as they had Parisians.  The short of the story was that New Yorkers, like most Americans then and today, were too damned busy to be bothered and ignored the Nazis.  Deflated and sad, their hearts lost to the bustle of the city, the Nazis soon realized their error, packed up their wares, their flags and their hate and went home.

Why do I mention this tale?  It’s a little complicated but not tricky.

Americans unite under one flag yet from baseball loyalties, to politics or faith issues, we may not agree on much else.  My friend Jay Pelc is an arch Conservative who believes President Obama is ruining this nation, minute by minute.  He believes the president is handing power over to Muslim extremists with every breath he takes.  In politics, we could not be more opposite.  But, as Met fans, we sit together happily, arm in arm through one losing season after another.  In baseball, nothing comes between us.

Folks in two cities wonder why I’m cheering for Baltimore, my adopted town, in its playoff series against the New York Yankees.  They wonder how a native New Yorker doesn’t root for the other local team once his team is out of the running.

Alan Dershowitz said it best. “No self respecting Brooklynite roots for the Yankees.”

Rudy Guiliani and Spike Lee, two famous Brooklynites and fellow Yankee fans should take notice.  Plus, Baltimore needs more cheerleaders and I’m happy to be one of them.

“The series now heads to ‘Fun City’”, were sportscaster Joe Angel’s words to his Baltimore radio audience after Buck Showalter’s Orioles beat the Yankees on Monday night at Camden Yards.  Fun City is hardly how this forty year New Yorker would describe his hometown.  Nonetheless, New York City has changed for the better and I desperately want the same for Baltimore.

In 1993, New York was still tax poor, underemployed, violent and angry at itself.  Like many old eastern cities, it had endured decades of disinvestment and the citizens of New York seemed to be at each other’s throats.  Buck Showalter was then manager of the Yankees.  In his arsenal were young Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettite.  Though Buck’s tenure in New York ended after three seasons in 1995, those four young men learned to be professionals and thrived under his watch.

By 1996, the Yankees captured their first title in 15 years and New York, with Rudy Giuliani at the helm, had started to right itself.  Yankee fans should be ever thankful to Major League Baseball that George Steinbrenner had been banned during those early years, so his hands were kept from using budding young stars Jeter, Williams or Pettite as trade bait.  Still, Steinbrenner showed his greatness in signing career reprobates Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, two beautiful athletes who were surely Hall of Fame bound had they not gotten caught up in addiction.  In all, it seemed as if both the Yankees and Giuliani were leading the way for all New Yorkers to success after decades of dread.

For the record, I’ve never like Rudy Giuliani, the Caeser of New York.  He took credit for everything he could.  When he couldn’t get credit, he sued.   Still, I never had to like the man.  The analogy I use is that during Giuliani’s first term especially, New Yorkers managed to stay more angry with him than with each other, which gave the common citizen a break from everyday fear.  From the subways to the streets, rich and poor alike complained about him to one another.  In eight years, he managed to anger most every group and subgroup of people.  That was his genius and Fun City is his legacy.

Baltimore’s ascent has been much slower though the Orioles this season have moved toward success at a speed seen only on the interstate that runs through our city.  Still, the similarities with the 1995 Yankees are clear.

Buck Showalter has, once again, a mixed bag of young and old whom he has groomed into a fiercely competitive team.  He has budding young stars in Adam Jones, Matt Wieters, and ‘Super’ Manny Machado.  As well, ownership has managed to stay out of the way to allow the baseball professionals to do their work.  We can only hope that Baltimore’s civilian leadership takes some cues from the baseball team and starts to believe in itself.

It was fall 2001 and the Yankees were in the Bronx, playing in the Series against the Diamondbacks, hoping for their fifth title in six years.   Looming downtown in lower Manhattan, under lighting visible for tens of miles was the still emanating dust from the wreckage of the World Trade Centers that had been bombed some weeks earlier on September 11th.  I’d picked up my sister Marilyn at Penn Station on her arrival from D.C. by train.  Before going home to mom’s in Brooklyn, we parked at Broadway and Vecsey Street so she could get a glance at the carnage.

When we got home, we found mother in the kitchen with the ball game on the radio.  Her television was no longer of use as the signal towers for the non cable viewer had gone down with Trade Center One.  Even so, my sister and I were stunned as we quickly realized that our mother was rooting for the Yankees.

“Your father would have rooted for the Yankees, this year of all years” mother said.

Marilyn and I were shocked.  We both knew Dad was dead only five years to that point.  We knew mother had lost a husband of forty eight years and was still somewhat rudderless.  Even so, making assumptions such as she had, was vaguely dangerous to at least two of her children.  In that moment, I hoped to choose my words wisely:

“Listen Mom”, I said, “I don’t care if the Yankees are playing the bin Laden Giants.  Dad would never root for the Yankees.  We don’t root for the Yankees.  Never.”

Lucky for me, mother laughed.  I think she might even have been relieved.  She had endured gangster ridden Chicago in the 1920’s, the Depression and the Second World War.  She had buried two infant children and still raised seven healthy ones with our father.  And though she never admitted as much to us before her death, the bombing of New York was no excuse for the fact that she had erred in rooting for the Yankees.

‘E Pluribus Unum’ does not apply easily in all situations for Americans.  Uniting around a common foe in tragedy does not mean we must agree on all things, least of all the Yankees.  New Yorkers in a fictionalized 1942 would surely have united against the Nazis.  Even so, they would have held just as true to local allegiances throughout- Giants, Dodgers or Yankees.  That is the ‘pluribus’ that creates our ‘unum’.

Let’s go Baltimore!