It's funny, but I've found that during my travels abroad, baseball has a funny way of making me feel homesick. Maybe because it so signifies America for me -- I remember all the grassroots local baseball fundraisers after 9/11, and I always get teary-eyed singing the anthem at the start of a game (the pregnant pause after the "O say does the star-spangled banner yet wave" gets to me every time...One of my favorite stories about our anthem is being in the Philippines. My cousin's husband, Aries, was explaining how much Americans loved our anthem, saying: "And even before the song is over, everyone starts screaming and clapping and cheering! It's true, I've seen it on tv!!" -- with all his friends completely incredulous).
I think back to all the times I've "watched" world series games at odd hours of the day -- I have memories of being in a hotel lobby (of course I now can't even remember where) and IM'ing with my close friend Sue while yahoo sports showed icons of men on base. I got shockingly emotional over the summer when Tyler and I went to our last Yankees game before leaving for Seoul -- sure, there was the Americana of it all and "God Bless America" in the seventh inning stretch, as well as knowing this would be the last time I saw Jeter play. But it was more than that, as well -- it served as a poignant reminder of time marching on...which I'm only beginning to recognize now with my emotions surprising me again with every Jeter video I've watched this weekend (and there have been a lot!)
An article I read in the Wall Street Journal started getting at a core piece of this, which perhaps more strongly resonated because the author and I appear to be the same age: "Jeter isn't just a baseball player; he is a human metronome, marking time in everyone's lives. When he came into the scene in 1996, I was a junior in high school in the New York suburbs, and he was a rookie winning the World Series." After college, going to Yankees away games and cheering on Jeter (and Jorge and Bernie, our favorites) started to become a tradition for my best friend, Susan, and I. Even when I moved to India and caught games during visits home, Jeter still looked the same to me -- there was some sense of a constant. And perhaps that's part of it. I always say it's easy to leave NYC because I know NYC will always be there. But I take for granted that it will be my same NYC when I come home because in the past, it pretty much always has been -- my parents living in the same house, my relatives and friends nearby, my same apartment, my same favorite bagel place and sushi restaurant... and as silly as it seems, the Yankees and Derek Jeter.
I must have watched this video at least five times over the weekend: link here. It's Jeter's walk-off single in his final game at Yankee stadium last week (my Friday morning here), which shockingly took me a while to find: lots of videos from ESPN and others just showed the actual play, but I wanted all the emotion... the fans "cheering in a way reserved for legends" (as the NYT put it), his teammates, and Posada, Rivera, and Pettitte meeting him on the field (which apparently went against the planned script, which was for Jeter to walk around the stadium and for them to appear at home base as he walked back -- kindda a "join us now" moment), his going to his parents and his nephew tipping his hat to him... I really like this photo from the New Yorker:
People ask why I like the Yankees. Depending on how much the person really seems to care, they get different answers stemming from "I'm from NY" to "I grew up a Mets fan (none of our parents would drive to the Bronx), but then went to school in Boston, so cheering for NY meant cheering for the Yankees against the Red Sox." The real reason, which few people know because it's way too much to get into during trash talk banter, is actually much more emotional for me. A lot of it can be summed up in this amazing documentary, called "Nine Innings from Ground Zero"; link to streaming movie can be found here.
While I had grown up in New York, it wasn't until I moved to NYC after college in the summer of 2001 that I started considering myself a real New Yorker. I felt grown up, living in my own apartment, and doing grown-up things like working and buying groceries (cooking was a different question).
Then the attacks happened. Being so new to NYC, the weeks and months following 9/11 showed me what it meant to be a New Yorker. What I remember most during that time was how New Yorkers pulled together. While I was in Boston for training trying to make it back to NYC, I remember Brian calling while standing on line to give blood, saying that the lines were down the block and across the street; Michelle and other friends volunteered at a hospital those first days. I remember going with my new colleagues to candlelight vigils in Union Square, and spending evenings with Susan on the West Side Highway cheering firefighters and relief workers emerging from the site.
At some point, there started to be a return to quasi-normalcy. The stock market reopened, store windows started displaying items for sale instead of just black curtains, we all went back to work, and baseball resumed. The first game in NY was the Mets hosting the Braves; when Mike Piazza hit a home run at the top of the eighth, I remember seeing highlights of the crowd responding with cheers, some tears, and then: "USA! USA! USA!"
But what I remember the most were the Yankees. When the games were canceled right after the attacks, I remember reading about Joe Torre, Derek Jeter, and Bernie Williams visiting various sites to comfort emergency workers and relatives of victims. I remember reading that they didn't know what to say or do, that they wondered if they should even be there. Later, Torre's co-author wrote about Bernie Williams walking up to a grieving woman during one of their visits and saying: "I don't know what to say... but you look like you need a hug." Rudy Giuliani, whose face was everywhere during those first few months, routinely alternated between FDNY, NYPD, and Yankees baseball caps.
Walking through the 9/11 Memorial and Museum with Tyler this past summer, I recalled the sense of helplessness, of not knowing what to say or do during those first few weeks. We were all off from work, but they were far from vacation days -- very little of what we did felt "right."
And as silly as it sounds, in one small way, in one corner of life, once the Yankees started playing again, we all knew exactly what to do. Cheer like crazy. And so we did. The NY Public Library dressed their stone lions with Yankees caps. I bought my first Jeter jersey. Walking around the city, we all had something that united us besides the attacks. In a city where you don't talk to strangers, as we started to win our division and then went onto the World Series, strangers would talk about the games out in coffee shops and around the city. And for the first time in a few weeks, it felt okay to be happy, to be hopeful, and even to be laughing out in public (who knew that ten years later, I would marry into a Mariners family, whose memories of those post-season games would be very different from my own...)
During the World Series, Curt Schilling (Arizona's starting pitcher) was asked to comment on the mystique and aura of Yankee Stadium. With Arizona already winning the first two games of the World Series, Schilling responded, "Mystique and aura -- those are dancers in a nightclub." I remember watching the next game and tearing up seeing a sign that read: "Mystique and aura: appearing nightly." It was the ninth inning with two outs and two strikes. We were down by two points with one man on base. Byung-Hyun Kim (more about him when I blog about Korean baseball) was Arizona's relief pitcher. I was watching with Brian and remember thinking: "All we need is a homerun!" On Kim's first pitch, the improbable happened: a home run!! We started screaming and heard our neighbors screaming too. The game went into extra innings and Jeter eventually went on to hit a walk-off homer.
The next day, a NY publication (maybe the NY Post?) had the headline: "We're back." They may have been talking about the Yankees, but with everyone so excited, it felt like it applied to NYC as well. The next night, it felt like deja vu. We were again down by two points; I remember talking to our doorman, Jerry, during one of the breaks, with him saying we need some more magic tonight as well. It was the ninth inning, with once again two outs, two strikes, and one man on base. On Kim's second pitch, the Yankees got yet another two-run homer, going into extra innings and a hit from Soriano winning the game for the Yankees. Talk about drama.
Alas, as we all remember, the Diamondbacks went on the win the World Series. But what I remember most about that time was the city finally cheering and laughing and in some small way, coming alive again. During that post-season, the Yankees gave us something that had felt missing since the attacks: a dose of magic. And perhaps it's that same magic that makes this video of Jeter's last night at Yankee stadium so poignant.
Living in America, it's easy to see so many of our differences. Tyler and I joke that we likely would never have gotten together if we had met in America: east coast vs west coast; big city vs small town; opera vs motorcycles (which would later become opera and motorcycles -- sometimes in the same weekend). Yet meeting abroad, all we noticed were our similarities.
If I were living in the States now, I would probably be much more into the standings: my team versus yours and who will likely be in the World Series. Yet from here, it's just American baseball. When I think about differences, I think about what's different between baseball in America versus baseball here (more to come on that!) Maybe that's why I loved this video so much of Jeter's last career game, which occurred in Fenway Park this past weekend: opposing fans coming together, the whole stadium cheering, and the Red Sox players clapping to show their respect.
And as far as I feel watching these videos on the other side of the world, I also smile thinking about how something as seemingly trivial as baseball can also unite people across the globe. So as post-season draws near, both in the US and here in Korea, the only thing left to say is: "Play Ball!"
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