NEW YORK — They were doing the wave at Yankee Stadium on Monday night, in the seventh inning of a game the home team needed to win but was in the process of losing.
It was almost as if the 53,000 people in the stands realized the real fight was happening down in Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fla., and for a change, it did not involve members of the New York Yankees’ front office. Halfway through the season, the American League East looks like a two-team race once again, only for the first time in 12 years, one of those teams is not likely to be the Yankees.
And you know what? Yankee Nation seems OK with it. Or at least, resigned to the fact that this team is — how do you put it delicately? — not all that good.
This is in marked contrast to those barbarians over in Flushing, who insist on going down kicking and screaming and cursing, still laboring under the delusion that their team, despite all evidence to the contrary, is headed to the World Series. After all, Omar Minaya tells them so on an almost daily basis. They are making no such claims up in the Bronx, where they seem to have a plan for a future that actually extends beyond Sept. 30, 2008.
Maybe it was the parting of ways with Joe Torre, or the early withdrawal from the Johan Santana sweepstakes, or the stubborn insistence this year of the front office to promote kids such as Justin Christian and Brett Gardner rather than buy up other team’s mistakes, but clearly, the message has been sent and it has been received: Yankees fans, your season has come. And come again and again and again.
That was 1996. And 1998, 1999 and 2000.
But not this season. Not with this team.
Aside from the handicaps of a new manager, an aging roster and a shaky rotation, the Yankees face an unforeseen obstacle, the presence of a third horse in what had for years been a match race between them and the Boston Red Sox. The Rays, who play right under the noses of the Steinbrenner family in Tampa Bay, don’t appear to be going anywhere the Yankees would like them to go, which is back down where they belong. Monday night, the Rays held off a ninth-inning rally to beat Boston, 5-4, and take a 1 1/2-game lead in the division. Halfway through the season, the Rays are on pace to win 99 games, the Red Sox to win 98 and the Yankees to finish a well-beaten third.
So far, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to confiscate the shoelaces and belt buckles of Yankees fans coming into the park. Call it acceptance, call it relief, call it a simple return to sanity after more than a decade of greed, arrogance and entitlement, but there is a different feeling in the Bronx these days, a feeling that has rarely been associated with this team, this ballpark and this fan base. It’s not apathy — they still live and die with each pitch — and it’s not boredom, because the vast majority of them stuck around to the end, doing what fans did back in the 1900s, before they needed mortgages to afford tickets and now, gas to drive to the ballpark, and before anything short of winning it all was nothing short of failure.
Monday night, these people were simply enjoying a night at the ballpark.
Unlike at Shea Stadium, where they begin booing when Carlos Delgado’s car pulls into the player’s lot and continue on their way down the ramps after six innings, this crowd cheered at appropriate times, as when new call-up Gardner stepped to the plate to begin his first major-league at-bat, and even after he grounded out to end it. The closest thing to a boo were the calls of “Moose!” heard frequently throughout the first six innings as Mike Mussina once again pitched just well enough to lose. They didn’t even boo when Derek Jeter, who is hitting 30 points below his career average and having an altogether miserable season, looked awful flailing at a sinker striking out in the eighth, or when Jorge Posada popped out to end the 2-1 loss to the Texas Rangers.
It’s almost as if the two franchises have traded personalities, the ballparks have switched crowds and the teams have swapped philosophies. These days, it is the Yankees who seem to have rediscovered the virtues of patience and tolerance, and the New York Mets who seem determined to buy their way out of trouble.
In studying the Yankees plan of success, the Mets seem to have missed one important lesson: You can buy performance but not results.
The Yankees figured that one out a while ago, and judging by Monday night, so too have their fans.
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