The Great Cashby

Something in El Duque's comment the other day about Cashman being a Sunset Boulevard feeling about him inspired this idea.  With apologies, of course, to F. Scott...

The House that Cashby Built was mostly empty when I left.  One night I did see a 4 Train pull up and a man in a Paulie O'Neill shirt jump out and peer down into the park.  Probably it was some final fan who had been away at the ends of the earth, and didn't know that baseball like it should be wasn't played there anymore.

But after a few minutes of staring at all the strikeouts, and the constant pitching changes, and the vendors selling their $12 cups of rodent-besmirched beer, he fell asleep, and when the train came again he was gone.

On the white steps of the park, an obscene word, scrawled by some Red Thunder fan with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone.  There was no one else to notice, or to hear.  In the distance came the faint sounds of cheering, from the hundreds of soccer fans gathered at Hal's sparkling new NYCFC stadium a few blocks to the south.

I thought of Cashby's wonder when he first made it out of the mailroom and was picked to run this mighty ball club at Old George's pleasure.  He had come a long way in a very short time to this blue pinstriped team, and his dream of building a championship ball club all on his own must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

He did not know that that team was already behind him, squashed somewhere in the vast obscurity that was the Florida estates of the Steinbrenner family, while the dark playing fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Cashby believed in the power pitching arm, the great junk pile pick-up, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us this season, and in 2017, and 2016, and 2015, and—but that's no matter.  Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.  Neil Walker will retire, and Jacoby Ellsbury will want to play in Seattle...And one fine season—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into third place.