It's only a game (right, dad?)...

Sigh… once again, my baseball team, my real-life heroes, my Yankees, have let me down and broken my heart, leaving me with the empty, disappointed feeling of a long looming winter with no baseball. Not to mention the question of whether Joe Torre will be manager next year. Personally, I don’t think Torre should be punished for mistakes that Brian Cashman has made. For years he’s done nothing but shell out millions of dollars for players who don’t play up to their hyped standards. And then finally, this year, we start to see some NEW talent from the Yankee farm – like Shelley Duncan and Joba Chamberlain – and what happens? We come back from 14 games behind Boston to win the Wild Card spot. Perhaps we should’ve been looking for those new guys all along? Hmmm… about time Cashman figured that out (and I’ve always thought it was interesting that his name is CASH man)…

And Torre didn’t do a bad job in the postseason games – he was pulling pitchers quickly, before too much damage had been done, and making some good lineup decisions. But the one thing Torre can’t do is go out there and SWING THE BATS for these guys. Your pitching can be stellar, but if the offense isn’t there, what’s the point? But even yesterday, when we had 12 hits and three home runs, it just wasn’t enough. (It would’ve helped, of course, if someone had a hit a home run one of the gazillion times we had runners in scoring position…) No, I guess it just wasn’t meant to be this year…

And somewhere in the midst of my Yankee mourning, I figured something out – sure, a World Series win this year would’ve been great, but wouldn’t a win NEXT year be even better? Next year is the final year the Yankees will be playing in the old stadium… the stadium where I saw my very first baseball game… where I used to sit in the stands right behind Dave Winfield and listen to the sounds of the rowdy fans in the bleachers below… the stadium where I used to eat knishes and giant pretzels… where I was certain I was the Yankees’ clandestine good luck charm… where Bob Sheppard was the announcer and somehow still is… where I watched a tattered American flag from the 9/11 rubble wave tenaciously over the outfield and felt the concrete floors shake from the force of fifty-five thousand loyal fans cheering their team come hell or high water or anything else you can throw at New York… Yeah, a win would’ve been great this year. But a win next year would be phenomenal…

On another topic entirely… Rick and I thought our house was about to be hit with a quickly-falling plane last night. We were hanging out in the house – me in the family room and Rick in his study – and I heard a roaring noise somewhere off in the distance. At first I thought perhaps it was the TV, but as it got louder and louder, I realized it was coming from outside. And not only that, but the roaring began to sound not unlike the sound of the crashing plane on Lost – engines revving erratically, air wooshing past a fuselage… I seriously thought the thing was going down. So I jumped up from the couch and ran to the back porch door, almost afraid to look outside – but by the time I’d opened it and taken a peek, the plane had passed overhead and kept on going. I never even SAW it – so who’s to say it was actually a plane, anyway? UFO, perhaps? Little green men from Roswell, New Mexico? I mean, it went from sounding like a plane crash waiting to happen to sounding like nothing but crickets chirping so fast it seemed really strange. Rick ran outside as I was standing on the porch in bewilderment, looking for the plane that no longer seemed to exist, and asked if I’d heard the plane that was about to crash. We both stood in the backyard for a couple minutes, waiting to hear a distant “boom” and flash of light, but it never happened. We even searched the local news websites a little bit later, quite certain we’d be reading about a downed plane somewhere in the county. Or at least about a spaceship full of little green men…

Guess we’ll never know what it was that flew overhead last night… but I suppose just because something seems like it’s about to crash and burn doesn’t mean it can’t land safely and climb into the skies at another time. Which is exactly what the Yankees will do next year… :)