I.
I took this picture on August 18, 2018, at approximately 1:09 p.m. EDT, from a seat in Section 107 of Yankee Stadium. This was not taken with the goal of capturing something, or the image of something, that I judged to have significant aesthetic value. It simply documents where I was when the photograph was taken. At any rate, I feel that I lack the skills a photographer requires to give what is effectively a landscape much meaning beyond it’s appearance. For the purposes of this blog post, this image is only the source for all subsequent fragments.
II.
The ostensible subject of the photograph is the ceremony held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1998 New York Yankees, who won an MLB record 125 games combined between the regular season and the postseason en route to the club’s 24th World Series title. The team is technically within living memory for me, but I was five-years-old in 1998 and had not started following baseball yet. I have no memory of David Wells’s perfect game, or of Shane Spencer’s explosive September, or of Scott Brosius’s home run off Padres closer Trevor Hoffman. These events only exist for me as highlights on the YES Network, as anecdotes for radio play-by-play announcer John Sterling to recycle in-between pitches. That team is a part of history that, as a fan, I can claim, but only in the sense that, as a New Jerseyian, I can claim Washington’s victory at Trenton.
Absorbing a team’s history is, I feel, an under-appreciated part of sports fandom. Such study lacks the visceral appeal of watching a team in the present, or of listening to the yahoos yammering about them on sports talk radio, or of imagining the roster moves they might make as the deadline approaches. Those are the moments when the sentiments of hope and frustration and relief and so on are at their most intense beneath a fan’s skin. Box scores, encyclopedia entries, documentaries: these are intellectual pleasures, if “pleasure” is even the word for it. Yet what is the point of latching onto a uniform if not to connect with the community it represents, and the shared history that is so essential to it?
III.
If you look into the background of that photograph, you can make out the members of the 1998 Yankees milling about by the pitcher’s mound. You might gather from their distant appearance that we did not have a great view of the ceremony. In fact, we may have had the worst possible view of it in the whole stadium.
First, we were of course a fair ways away from the action, which is inevitable when one is sitting in the outfield seats. During a game, it’s not actually so bad, as when the game is in motion there is more information for one to perceive: the pitch, the check swing, the humpback liner into foul territory, the first base coach’s lunge out of danger. But during the ceremony, there was very little motion to speak of, just the slow approach of the athletes and the announcers talking into microphones. It’s not quite like observing a sculpture garden from an aircraft, but the feeling is similar.
You may be wondering why we didn’t just watch the ceremonies on the giant video feed on the scoreboard. Well, we couldn’t see that either. We were tucked under the second deck of outfield seats, which provided some cover from the rain that didn’t actually, come, but blocked our view of the scoreboard, or at least, the replay screen. Hell, we could barely see the TV screens playing the YES Network’s coverage of the event, because we happened to be directly underneath them. It was like watching a high school graduation from the third row of a movie theater: feasible, but bad for one’s muscles.
The obstructed view of the action is the trade-off one must make in exchange for seeing a sporting event live and in-person. One loses the variety of angles and vantage points that go into a television broadcast, that ensures the viewer at home can follow the action frame-by-frame. Can it be annoying? Certainly, at times (read the previous three paragraphs for proof). But what one gains by being there is more than just the aura of the actual experience. There’s a certain charm in not knowing whether Didi Gregorius got enough of the ball for a home run because of the mass of standing, taller fans in front of you, until you hear their buzzing become a roar and see, in your peripheral vision, Didi’s hustle become a trot. That’s the sensation one chases at a baseball game.
IV.
Moving to center-frame, you can see the right field foul pole. Foul poles are one of my favorite oddities of baseball, for despite their name they reside in fair territory. A batted ball that hits one of the poles on the fly is a home run, even if it brushes the outermost point of it. That point where they touch is all that counts.
During the game, from our vantage point, the foul pole did more than divide foul from fair. It erected a barrier between the pitcher on one side, and the batter, catcher, and umpire on the other. For an imperceptible instant, the pole would conceal the ball as it passed from the pitcher’s fingertips to the front edge of home plate. But I feel that on a symbolic level it revealed far more. That bright yellow division of mound and plate highlighted the distinction between the different disciplines of baseball. For the pitcher and the batter are only nominally playing the sport; they are dueling adversaries who at most speak different dialects of the same kinesthetic language. They even have separate living quarters during the game: the substitute hitters get the dugout, the relievers the bullpen. There are only so many Shohei Ohtanis in the world, and even he’s been a one-way player since his injury earlier this season.
V.
The part of the photograph that most interests me is a pure accident, something I didn’t notice until I looked through my gallery later on in the day: the fan in black standing by the foul pole, facing but turned away from the security agent positioned beyond the outfield fence. A deferred confrontation with authority.
I was halfheartedly thinking about such confrontation when my dad and I were entering Yankee Stadium, winding our way through the labyrinth of fencing separating us from the ticket-takers and metal detectors. We were moving at a rhythm and a speed reminiscent of airport security screenings, and so in one of my many failed attempts at acting like a stand-up comedian, I said to my dad, “It’s getting to the point where they won’t even let you say ‘Bronx Bombers’ at a ballgame.” I said this, of course, far from the ears of anyone who might do something about it. Even my subversive instincts are cowardly.
When we left the game, we passed through the same gate that we entered through, and by then the barricades had been removed, sent off to wherever it is that they’re stored. That’s honestly a more subversive occurrence: what was once erected may still be dismantled. Shame I didn’t think to comment on it at the time. I might have saved face with myself.
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Thanks for reading! If you like this fragmentary style of reflection, then check out the previous installments in my occasional “X Fragments on Y” series: 13 Fragments on the 2017 National Book Festival and Four Fragments on Nothing.
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