The New York Yankees managed to cram the emotions of an entire season into one month. There was doubt, panic, hysteria, jubilation and, finally, hope.
If you live in New York, you can go through those emotions in the course of an hour. So in one sense, the Yankees' early roller coaster is emblematic of their city.
They were swept at home by their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox, and two of their high-profile players suffered through slumps. Alex Rodriguez had a miserable beginning, going 1 for 17 during a series at Fenway Park, and saw his name plastered unflatteringly on a tabloid's back page. During his 0-for-32 slide, Derek Jeter was booed by Yankees fans.
Rodriguez has righted himself, Jeter broke out of his slump with a home run and the Yankees have swept two consecutive series, against Oakland and Kansas City. "Right now, I think we have a little more of a sense of what we can do as a team," Manager Joe Torre said yesterday after the Yankees beat Kansas City for the third game in a row.
I don't lavish praise on the Yankees and I probably don't give them enough credit because, well, because they've bought the answer: A-Rod at third, Gary Sheffield in right and Kevin Brown on the mound.
• The most communal leagues of our professional sports landscape are the National Basketball Association and the National Football League. They use salary caps in an attempt to even the competition and level the playing field. I've always liked that system.
But baseball is the national pastime and the one that reflects how life here really works: you see what you want and, if you can afford it, you buy it.
To his credit, Allard Baird, Kansas City's general manager, refused to use the small-market-blues rap to explain why his team was swept out of Yankee Stadium.
"When the first pitch of the season's thrown, you can throw away salaries, it's a baseball game," Baird said after yesterday's 4-2 loss. "If you're in the major leagues, your goal is to go out there and win no matter who you're playing."
But even Baird concedes that although that may be true between April and September, everything after that is money ball.
Wealth wins: most of the time, the team with the most gold winds up with all the goodies.
A general manager has to be aware of his team's place in baseball's food chain. In that respect, Kansas City should be nervous about Carlos Beltran, the 27-year-old center fielder who will be a free agent after this season.
You don't think the Yankees would love to see Beltran playing center field here next spring? The way he smacked Yankees pitching around? You can almost see Beltran batting second behind Jeter, in front of A-Rod and Sheffield.
If the Yankees want Beltran — and they should — they'll buy him.
This is a league of excesses, one that has allowed itself to get away without serious drug testing and allows teams with the fattest wallets to bulk up on talent.
"That's the reality of the game and that's the house we live in," Baird said. "We know that those things are going to happen, and you have to prepare accordingly."
True, a roster of All-Star players still has to play the game. Jeter wasn't thinking about his salary when he was being booed, and A-Rod wasn't thinking about his millions when he was trying to get a hit. They felt the pressure of meeting high expectations.
"As players," Torre said yesterday, "you start fighting yourself, like we were in that Boston series. I don't care how good you are. Your instincts are not going to work for you if you start trying so hard.
"It's not easy for players to tell themselves, `Don't try so hard.' But as long as you allow yourself to play the game, let the game come to you a little bit. We were running out there, and trying to meet it halfway, and it was beating us up."
A baseball season is a succession of panic attacks. The Yankees survived theirs, and now Kansas City is having one. That's right, small-market teams panic, too. The idea that fans in so-called small markets are patient, that the news media is less brutal, is a myth.
There are high expectations and immediate expectations. "We're going through a little bit of that in Kansas City because the expectations were very high coming into the season," Baird said.
After Florida defeated the Yankees in the World Series last fall, we all said there was no excuse for small-market failure.
But time will show that what happened to the Yankees last fall against the Marlins was an anomaly. The Texas Rangers will not roar into the postseason and do what the Marlins did to the Yankees. When the Rangers begin going down to injuries and there is no comparable replacement part, they'll plummet.
The Yankees simply plug in a new part.
This is the essence of a sport that mirrors life. Life is not always fair, and neither is baseball.
By William C. Rhoden.
From The New York Times of May 3, 2004.