Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville Read Online Free PDF Page A

feeling of personal pride that my youngest son, Ethan, has now continued a family tradition into a fourth generation—although he grew up in Boston, and three generations of Yankee fandom have now been eclipsed, understandably of course, by his exquisite pain of rooting for the Red Sox, and hoping to live long enough to win another World Series—last achieved in 1918!
    2. If we honor the entertainment and real estate industries’ cliché that the three most important factors for success are “location, location, location,” then we must aver, I think, that my being a baseball fan requires no special explanation and should evoke no surprise, whereas we might become puzzled and feel the need for some resolution if I were indifferent to the game. As a pure contingency of my own life, I happened to come of baseball fandom’s age in the greatest conjunction of time and place that the game has ever known: in New York City during the late 1940s and early 1950s. (I was born on September 10, 1941.)
    The situation was entirely unfair to the rest of the country, but—hey—you can’t possibly cast any blame on me, so I owe no one any apology. From 1947 to 1957, New York City had the three greatest teams in major league baseball. (Many fans do not understand why a county or borough, rather than a full city, had its own team as the Brooklyn Dodgers. But New York City did not incorporate its outer boroughs into a single city until 1897, so the Dodgers represented an independent city when the team first formed and played major league ball.)
    During these eleven years, one of the three New York teams (the Yankees of the American League and the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League) won the World Series in all but two years, when the Cleveland Indians prevailed in 1948 and Milwaukee in 1957. Only in 1948—Cleveland vs. the Boston Braves—did a New York team not play in the Series at all. In seven of these years (’47, ’49, ’51, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56) two New York teams played each other in the World Series—all won by my beloved Yankees except for the ultimate tragedy of ’55, when the Dodgers won their single victory over the Yanks as a Brooklyn team. We got them back the next year, though, in ’56!
    My earliest vague memories of baseball date to the 1946 or 1947 season. I remember the great 1948 season in substantial detail—the year that should have been the Boston subway series, but the Indians tied the Red Sox and then won the single game playoff for the right to play the Boston Braves in the World Series. Starting in 1949, I suspect that I could narrate at least the major events of all World Series games through the Yankees’ revenge on Milwaukee in the 1958 contest.
    But my point is simply this—and plausible though the claim may be as an abstraction, one really had to “live it” to know the full extent of the pull and the virtual inevitability—during these years, nearly all boys in New York City and quite a few girls, as well, became passionate baseball fans, spending a good bit of each day, from April to early October, tracing the developing fate of one’s favorites.
    Patterns of rooting were neither entirely capricious nor entirely predictable. Nearly all of Brooklyn’s two million citizens rooted passionately for the Dodgers. I’m still mad at my cousin Steve Sosland for failing to protect me, as he promised he would, when I admitted to being a Yankee fan while playing stickball with his Brooklyn neighborhood friends—the worst street beating I ever received, but a rite of passage in the coming of age for any New York street kid.
    The still solid Jewish and Italian ethnic communities of the Bronx lived and died with the Yankees (a.k.a. The Bronx Bombers), of course. The Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants, located in northeastern Manhattan and literally within sight of Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River, did not command so clear a geographic region of nearly