By MIKE VACCARO
So I get a phone call from a Mets fan friend on Wednesday morning.
“Hey,” he says. “You think we can take a game off the Dodgers in this series?”
I laugh. He isn’t kidding.
“I’m going to be sick,” he says.
Yesterday, just past 4:30, I check my e-mail. A Yankee fan friend. He’s bypassed proper punctuation and capital letters and leaves a message that can best be described as either “incoherent” or “frightening,” depending on your point of view. Here it is, in its entirety:
” i swear this is the last time im going thru with this … too much pain … too much pressure … i can’t let my kids grow up like me … i feel like i need a rubber room ….”
Yep. THIS is why we’re fans. This is why the last couple of days, and the next couple, and (if all goes well) the next few weeks are and should be a wonderful reminer of why we keep coming back, why we keep checking scores when we should be doing chores, why we live and we die on the whims and wanderings of strangers.
I was at Shea Stadium Wednesday afternoon, when an entire ballpark’s mood swings would fill one of Dr. Melfi’s notebooks in about five minutes. I wasn’t at Yankee Stadium Thursday afternoon, but there were enough crowd shots on the ESPN broadcast to let anyone know what the mood was like there: frustrated, then ecstatic (after one of Johnny Boy’s patented one-handed home runs), then nervous, then nerve-wracked, then desperate, and then, finally, ultimately, sick.
People who aren’t sports fans don’t understand this. They can never understand this. Maybe they simply don’t want to understand. It’s easier in a lot of ways to ignore sports, to keep them outside of our hearts and our nervous systems. There’s less pain. There’s less anxiety. There’s less stress. Life is painful enough, anxious enough, stressful enough. Who needs more?
Sports fans do, that’s who. Living and dying nine innings at a time? Who are we kidding: there’s nothikng better than that. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing.