I’ve been a bad Yankee fan this year.
This season I’ve watched, maybe, 2 innings a week. I have two young kids, and of all the things I could (should) spend my time doing, watching a baseball game for 3+ hours is pretty low on the list.
When I have watched, the game is increasingly unrecognizable from the one I grew up with. (Get off my lawn alert!) The game’s “three true outcomes,” walks, strikeouts, and home runs, aren’t all that interesting to me.
All season long, I’ve kept an eye on the box scores, hoping I’d start to feel something for a team that was once the center of my 16-year-old universe.
And then, on Saturday afternoon, it happened.
Over the last three years I’ve casually introduced baseball and the Yankees to my son. On Saturday, a meaningful 4 pm game against the Red Sox, we planned to wear our Yankee shirts and watch the game together (with my wife and infant daughter) after naptime.
The game was mostly ho-hum, and we skipped a few innings to eat dinner outside, before coming back inside to watch the last few innings before bedtime.
My son is obsessed with The Green Monster, the massive green-painted wall in left field of Fenway Park. So when Giancarlo Stanton crushed a 452-foot grand slam to give the Yankees the lead – a home run he literally hit out of the stadium – my son and I went nuts, high-fiving each other and my wife as we watched replay after replay.
Now I have my reason to root for the Yankees to make and go deep into the playoffs, maybe even win the World Series: to recreate that moment of excitement and connecting I shared with my family. What better reason could there be?
Leave a comment