March 1, 2010

The Baseball World of New York

Matt Welch unloads on New Yorkers who think baseball ended when the Giants and Dodgers moved west.

I mean, hell, L.A. doesn’t even have one professional football team anymore, yet you don’t hear people like me complain that my very development was kneecapped by the eternally recurring loss of Nolan Cromwell. Yet here’s the MLB Channel last week, re-running that endless baseball shlockumentary from the awful (yet somehow awfully good!) Ken Burns, with its endless string of Stephen Jay Gouldses and Doris Kearns Goodwins decrying the horrid greed and childhood-murdering avarice of baseball owners who didn’t respect the Big Apple’s birthright to have 19 percent of all Major League Baseball teams compared to the western half of the country’s 0.

When watching this 16-year-old production, I was thinking “Well, at least most of these people are getting old and fading away, so maybe there will come a day when I don’t have to hear this anymore.” But reading Hamill’s latest I’ve come to the opposite conclusion: Boring New Yorkers who know squat-all about baseball will be trying to bum me out about the Dodgers and Giants when I’m on my deathbed, wrapping it all up in a bow of insufferable and inaccurate nostalgia that attempts to validate their mildly sad junior high school days by impugning the greatest-ever sport’s greatest-ever players: i.e., the ones playing right the hell now. With more passion even than Hit & Run readers who hate sports want to say to me right about now, I say to you, Pete Hamill: Enough!

I’m glad someone else wasn’t impressed with Baseball. Burns lost me when I realized his footage didn’t match his story. He’d show a player swinging in one park, then the ball sailing into the stands in another. I would rather have seen the show done in slide-show format like the Civil War.

8 thoughts on “The Baseball World of New York

  1. Dantheman

    The group of New Yorkers in Baseball was incredibly annoying. I thought their low point was discussing how horribly scarred they felt by the outcome of the 1960 World Series, as the Yankees were clearly the better team than the Pirates. They clearly acted as if it was their birthright to win the World Series every year.

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  2. giantsmidnightreplay

    As a recent transplant to NYC, I find the baseball fans here to be insufferably pompous about their teams. When they are terrible (like the mets are and will be for a while) they whine on and on about it. They are soo used to winning that they become indignant when they suck. I cannot fathom how you can possibly enjoy winning if you don’t lose. As for the east coast bias…. it is alive and well. Every once in a while I get a “hey how about that lincecum kid” but other than that the Giants and Dodgers might as well not exist to them

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  3. rbj

    If all those who lamented the Dodgers & Giants moving had actually shown up at the games those teams would never have left.

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  4. Joseph J. Finn

    I was more annoyed by the coastal biases; watching it, you’d barely know that the Cubs and Sox existed, much less dominated baseball at one time.

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  5. baycommuter

    uh, when did the White Sox dominate baseball? I guess 1917 and a shoulda-been WS in 1919. The 1906 Sox were a pitching-only fluke like the ’69 Mets. The Cubs might be the best team of the 1900s decade, that, but overall, the Cardinals are the strongest franchise from the middle of the country.

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  6. Dantheman

    It’s not a coastal bias. Baseball seemed to follow a very few teams (Yankees, Giants, Dodgers, Red Sox) and ignore the rest of the league (e.g., the Phillies, Orioles, etc. were ignored, even though coastal teams). I remember saying after watching it that there were likely more references to the Pittsburgh team from the Negro League than the one from the National League.

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  7. dch

    Lifetime NYer,Brooklynite and Yankee fan. I have nothing but contempt for NY fans that still pine for the 2 franchises that betrayed them 50 plus years ago. They are pathetic human beings. Citifield is an embarassment you go there and its basically a Dodger museum. The Dodgers are alive and well in LA-the Mets are not the new Dodgers. One of the reasons the Mets suck for basically 40 years is that they never knew who they were.

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  8. Ed

    I grew up in Brooklyn. I’m going to argue against the post and say New Yorkers have a legitimate complaint here. MLB moved or sanctioned the move of two teams from New York to California. They then put an expansion team in New York four years later! And now people complain about the Yankees getting all the money (though never about the Mets), which is really a function of there being two teams in the New York are but not three.

    The MLB really screwed up there. They could have put an expansion team in California and just kept one or both of the original teams in New York (and btw, the Mets are the replacement for the Giants, not the Dodgers). As it happens, they will probably wind up putting a second expansion team in the New York area to drain off some of the Yankees revenue.

    The only analogous case I can think of is the repeated attempts to get a franchise that works in DC. OK, and you have the Royals coming in after the Athletics in KC. Generally, when teams leave a city it is because the city really can’t support the team or the second team.

    Another thing to consider is that the Browns and both versions of the Senators never accomplished much in their original cities, and the Athletics and Braves were very inconsistent, with long stretches of being terrible. The Dodgers and Giants were actually very good in New York, both winning World Series right before they left (and the Giants never won a World Series after relocation). I think you will see some nostalgia for the Expos. You don’t see much nostalgia for the other relocated franchises because they just weren’t that good.

    Now granted there is some other stuff going on particular to the neurosis of a certain generation of New Yorkers, like Brooklyn’s inferiority complex vis Manhattan. But this one is mainly on MLB for never developing a coherent strategy as to where it wants its franchises to provide the maximum value to the game. Also, I’ve come to admire Robert Moses’ stand on the issue of diverting money that was supposed to be spent on public housing towards paying for a new stadium.

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