How we define success... an essay by our own DickAllen

From the meaty pen of DickAllen...

How We Define Success

I came of age in 1964 as a young boy of ten watching the longest succession of team winning streaks in baseball history come to an end. It was a wretched experience I didn’t fully understand. All around me in the Brooklyn there was a muted joy about this from wounded Dodgers loyalists, still grieving an unforgivable loss from six years earlier. It was a foul death and the end of the New York Yankees thirty-nine season winning record streak passed without the kind of joy it might have engendered ten years earlier. Too many people were grimly nursing beers in darkened bars throughout the borough, their only remaining desire in life to piss on Walter O’Malley’s grave when the time came.

The Yankees proceeded to become an afterthought in New York for a good many years. They were no longer hated, but neither were they pitied. When the Mets won the World Series over a vastly superior Orioles team in 1969, the Yankees simply didn’t exist.  The entire city had moved to Flushing, an aptly named place for those of you familiar with the environs. I spent many bitter cold spring days and nights in a sewer named Shea Stadium staring morosely at the Serval Zipper sign in center field waiting for summer to arrive. Yankee Stadium was something of a coffin in those days.

Then came the Seventies: George, Billie and Reggie along with the day of the 1978 playoff in Fenway. We all remember Bucky <Fuggin> Dent, but what won that game for me was a late Reggie home run, Mike Torrez the imbedded Yankee, and the most unforgettable play of the day: Sweet Lou in the glaring sun in right field, sticking his glove out and finding a ball in it. Had it gotten past him, the results (and history) would have been very different. Everywhere I went in New York that afternoon the city had come to a halt.  I still can see those old men gathered around a radio in Central Park, heads cocked to one side, listening with the knowledge they were bearing witness to history.

I won’t recite the great years of the 90s. Too many of you were witness to those historic teams. Right now, the Yankees are on another historic tear, both as a singular year that may transcend the most wins in a single season, and from a franchise perspective, well on their way to another winning season, currently at twenty-eight in a row and counting. While some of us may be well on the way to the grave by the time the franchise comes close to approaching the all-time record in 2033, and this being the advent of the All-Star break, it might just be a good time to gain some perspective.

All told, The Yankees have cumulative SIXTY-SEVEN consecutive winning seasons in two such streaks; the Sux have had three streaks totaling forty years, the Cardinals two years totaling twenty-nine. I won’t even bother to mention the difference in the number of rings. It’s not even close. The discrepancy between the success of the Yankees and relative success and failure of every other franchise is nearly astronomical. We’ve literally got nothing to complain about except for those barren years between 1964 and 1976, a paltry sum all things considered.

So, why are we all so unhappy? Sure, we have an owner who is the epitome of Wonder Bread blandness, a general manager who spends his time shopping at Goodwill and doesn’t seem to know much about acquiring talent, and a field manager who makes Sleepy Joe look like George Patton. The current Yankees team has surpassed any of our expectations and many of us are waiting for a downfall that seems inevitable. Our day-to-day hand wringing is very nearly myopic. It’s impossible to enjoy one of the best seasons in memory without lashing out at (insert name here) for the post-season failures of the last thirteen years in anticipation of yet another early exit.

I have a theory: we here have a higher standard for excellence than the powers that run the Yankees. We want to win. Every year. We have history behind us and those recent years when we were THE New York Yankees: the team everyone feared. Now not so much. If the recent series with the Asstros and the Sux tell us, this team is vulnerable. We can beat up on the many weaklings (what ever happened to parity?) but we can’t dominate everyone. Even Baltimore is on the rise. Watch out for them. The days of padding our stats on the O’s is over.

We have a higher standard, or at very least, a different standard for excellence than our leading lights. Harold the MBA, is a bean counter who mouths platitudes while keeping his eye on the bottom line. He points to the payroll as proof positive of his desire to win in spite of the common knowledge on this blog that money can’t buy happiness the same way acquiring the right players can. They are only interested in keeping us interested. Case in point: I am drooling over the discounted price tag on the MLB package and considering buying in for the second half, a sure sign of the failures to come. I have a good life and that would just about be the only thing that makes me miserable in the coming months.

All of us want the thrill of Paulie and Bernie and Jeet, Tino and Scotty, Darryl and Prince. In short, the only thing we want is the ring, while the ownership and management now want enough success to be profitable, the ring be damned. They say all the right things but words are cheap, just like a Joey Gallo at-bat. At this rate, The Intern will trade away more prospects for name brand players who won’t take us over the top. We won’t be rooting for Yankees anymore, merely rentals with a two-year expiration date. We root for laundry, but the bodies in them won’t really be Yankees because they haven’t earned their pinstripes. And we all know what it takes to earn that uniform; we hold them to a higher standard than Harold and The Intern. Those carpetbaggers will take the money and move on while promise languishes in Scranton. If nothing changes nothing changes.

Here's to another successful and profitable season. See you in eleven years when we break the great streak. Only we’ll be a mere shadow of those historic teams: during The Great Streak from 26-64, the Yankees were in the World Series twenty-six times, winning nineteen of them. The current streak from 93 to the present, we’ve been to the World Series seven times and won six of them. Past Yankees ownerships wanted to win championships at all cost and be profitable. The current ownership wants only to be successful as long as they remain profitable. That is what defines their success. We here have a very different perspective: we hold these Yankees to a higher standard than the people who run the show.