A YANKEE fan walks with the quiet confidence of a winner – not the blind optimism of a loser who just got lucky at the track.
Like a guy at OTB in a threadbare suit and thin-soled shoes shuffling with a ginny smile toward the window to collect 50 bucks on a 10-1 shot, Mets fans are indulging today in a delusion that their luck has really changed, that their ship has come in, that they are about to move to Easy Street.
We Yankee fans have been living on Easy Street for years and we’re not moving.
Not to make room for some orange-haired fools whose heroes include guys with truck-driver names like Tug, Cleon, Bud and Doc.
Not for the worshippers of a team that won its last World Series on a fluke.
Not for the rabble whose earliest memories are of Ed Kranepool, Charlie Neal, Marv Throneberry and a 120-loss season.
No, we on Easy Street have heroes with God-like names, names that transcend baseball and are etched into the bedrock of American culture: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra.
We attend baseball games in the sport’s holiest temple, Yankee Stadium, not a scrap-metal barn on the fringes of an airport.
And we travel to those games in style, on quick and sleek subway cars, smooth express lines, the B, D and the 4. Not rickety Redbirds that stop every eight blocks on creaky elevated tracks, the pathetic, overcrowded 7 line.
We are winners, we Yankee fans.
We don’t need to lose to cherish our victories more. We know how hard it is to win, how hard it is to stay on top with a mob of hungry upstarts trying to knock us from our happy perch.
We celebrate like winners – and we haven’t really won anything yet this year.
Yes, as the befuddled Mr. Kuntzman points out, the Mets players celebrated wildly after making it to the World Series.
Enjoy your freak victory over an injury-depleted St. Louis Cardinals team, Mets fans.
But like that loser at OTB, your next bet is not going to come in.