If Patrick Corbin is a REAL upstate Yankee fan, his signing is a done deal

Truth here: I don't know lint/squat/doodily-dick about pitching. I eat sliders. I don't throw them. Not only that, but I don't do Sabermetrics, or Freakinomics, or basic math. As Humphrey Bogart said in the epic boxing movie, The Harder They Fall, "Don't give me numbers, you can make those numbers jump through hoops!" Screw numbers. And while we're at it, screw knowledge! Screw information! Screw truth! Who needs it?

But wait... there is one thing I do know, and I know it from head to toe, from liver to kidney, from bowel movement to hair extension: 

I know the Upstate New York Yankee fan. 

Oh, yes. I do. I have seen them in the dawn, at the sunset, and under the full moon. I have seen them copulate. I have seen things - dear God, you don't want to know. And if Patrick Corbin is one of us, if he is truly of the cloth - that is, that he was raised to love the Scooter, the pinstripe, and the ghosts of Thurm and Billy - there is no debate within his heart or mind. Everything else is mere negotiation. If it's true that he is from a family of Upstate Yankee fans, well, write this down, folks: Corbin will be a Yankee.

Let me tell you a story about Syracuse Yankee fans. Sometime around the mid-eighties, when the team was crapola and the Orioles were a power, the Yankees were featured on the Saturday NBC Game of the Week. But the local network affiliate, recognizing that the Yankees were out of pennant contention, chose to run the alternative game. 

This unleashed the usual phoned death threats. (I might have made one myself. Once, when an opening day Yankee game was found to unavailable on our cable system, a buddy and I phoned Steinbrenner's office in NYC and demanded to talk with him personally, and then yelled at the secretary who wouldn't patch us directly through.) That day, several Yankee fans went to the Syracuse affiliate  on James Street to complain. They were told to leave. They refused, hanging around the parking lot and berating employees who came out to smoke.  Eventually, police were called. The indignant Yankee fans were dispersed, (though surely, I believe the cops were on their side. I once talked my way out of a speeding ticket by blaming the Yankee game on the radio.)  

Upstate New York was one of the first areas of the country to receive WPIX cable broadcasts during the late 1960s. Patrick Corbin's father and uncles surely grew up on the sweet nectar of White and Rizzuto. Throughout the seventies and eighties, you could drive the length of the Southern Tier Expressway - Route 17 - from Jamestown to Tuxedo, without missing a pitch on the radio. What evolved across the backroads and small towns of upstate was a link to Gotham itself, as deep and loyal as the love of a moose for his flying squirrel.

Patrick Corbin grew up in North Syracuse, where his family elders would have gone to MacArthur Stadium to watch Ron Guidry and Tucker Ashford. Surely, one of his uncles as a room devoted to the Yankees. His family, his friends, his neighborhood want this. And if Corbin is really from upstate New York - that is, he didn't lose his soul in the Arizona desert - that everything that has happened thus far in his career was only a prelude to the beginning of time. And his new age will begin on opening day in the Bronx. 

And if something goes wrong, I'm phoning Hal to complain.