Stadium Memories

All of the nostalgia that has surrounded the closing of Yankee (and Shea) Stadium during the past few days has me thinking about my own memories of going to these stadiums as a kid. Like many New Yorkers who are reminiscing about the first baseball games, I too, attended my first game at Yankee Stadium. My dad took me, along with his friend Paul, to an afternoon game in 1978. This was the "Bronx is Burning," formerly known as the "Bronx Zoo" Yankees in their heyday: Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Graig Nettles, Lou Piniella, and Ron Guidry. Reggie's three homers in Game 6 of the 1977 Series gave them the championship the previous year. By the time my dad brought me along to this summer afternoon game, the Yankees were probably in the middle of their historic comeback from 14 games behind the Boston Red Sox to win the American League East (Actually, this is not true. According to baseballreference.com, the game took place in April, well before the famous Yankee comeback, but hey, that is how memory works). Their opponents that day, the Milwaukee Brewers, were an up and coming team with emerging hitters like Robin Yount, Cecil Cooper, Paul Molitor, and sluggers such as Larry Hisle, Gorman Thomas, and pitchers like Mike Caldwell, who always seemed to give the Yankees trouble. In short, it was quite a time to see the Yankees.
But my 7-year old self was not aware of any of this when my dad took me to the so-called "House that Ruth Built." All I knew was that I wasn't quite sure if I liked the experience of going to a baseball game. While my memories of that day are a bit fuzzy, some details stick out. While folks like Billy Crystal and the Bob Costas wax poetic about seeing Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra at the Stadium, I recall being bewildered by the bizarre voice of Yankee P.A. announcer Bob Shepherd booming out of the speakers behind us in the bleachers and wondering what the man looked like. And I certainly remember being extremely uncomfortable sitting in the right field bleachers of the Stadium. I utterly hated sitting on these seats with no back support. The poor folks behind me probably wanted to kick the little twirp with the disheveled Afro who kept leaning on their legs for support. I also remember that the Yankees lost 3-2, even though Reggie Jackson hit a home run. I am pretty sure the ball landed near us because I remember the pushing and shoving by the fans as Reggie's blast made it into our section of the bleachers. Reggie's homer began my brief tenure as a Yankee fan. I loved his style, especially the way he stood and admired his home runs, or what he called "dingers," after he hit them. And what 7-year old didn't like that chocolate, caramel, peanut concoction that was the Reggie Bar? Plus, if you took away his glasses, he looked just like my dad, I thought. Because of Reggie, I grew to love the Yankees during the late 70s and early 80s, which is why I immediately got off the Yankee bandwagon in 1981 after they refused to resign him and let him leave for free agency. Reggie's subsequent reconciliation with the Yankee empire leads many to forget that George Steinbrenner kicked Reggie to the curb because he was supposedly finished after a supbar 1981 season.
I never forgave the Yankees for Reggie's banishment. Unlike most Bronxites, I spent much of my teenage years of the 1980s rooting hard against the Yankees. My cousin Aron and I would frequently take the train to the Stadium to root for their opponents during those years, when the Yankees of Don Mattingly and Dave Winfield were never good enough to win a division title. The entitled Yankee apologist of today might want to look at their team's history during the 80s, when Steinbrenner spent countless dollars on free agents (recall Steve Kemp, Ed Whitson, among many others) to field a team that was competitive, but not good enough to win a title. Recent Yankee failures suggest that they better prepare themselves for an "80s revival" all over again.
Despite my dislike for the Yankees, I have many fond memories of the Stadium during those years. Although we never sat in the more expensive box seats, I was able to sit in the General Admission section in the Stadium's sprawling upper deck with the money I scrounged up from my allowance. In the 80s, before corporations permanently closed off the working class fan from the best seats in the house, Aron and I hung out in the field level section during batting practice to get autographs from players and balls flying into the seats from players' bats. It was a fun time, made even more enjoyable by the fact that the Yankees never won anything except second place during those years.

A much more transformative experience happened to me when I went to my first Met game at Shea Stadium in 1979. My dad took me to see the Mets play the San Francisco Giants on a weeknight (how did my mother let that happen?) The details from that night are much more vivid in my mind. Dad bought two $2 General Admission (or were they Mezzanine?) seats before game time. In those days, there was little reason to buy advanced tickets because the Mets were perennial cellar dwellers so tickets were always plentiful. The Mets, managed by none other than Joe Torre, were in the middle of a seven-year run of futility, finishing in last place virtually every year. This was the forgettable post-Tom Seaver, pre-Darryl Strawberry/Doc Gooden era. Shea was virtually empty that night. Thankfully, unlike the Yankee Stadium bleachers, the seats we had that night had back support, which got me to like Shea right away. Dad hooked me up with a Met batting helmet, a yearbook, hot dog, and a soda. My chubby 8-year old self was ecstatic. Aside from the hot dogs, soda, and the more comfortable seating, what struck me the most was the man who took the mound for the Giants that night. I was mesmerized by his fluid high kicking pitching motion, his black stirrups stretched high over his bright orange socks and white cleats (this was the 70s, after all). I asked my dad who was this pitcher and he told me: "Vida Blue, he's a good pitcher." I probably asked him to repeat the name a couple of times because it wasn't a name I had heard before. Vida, who relied on his overpowering fastball to become one of the game's top pitchers in the 70s, was not very good that night. He got shelled by the lousy Mets on the way to a 10-3 loss. And while one part of the story is fairly predictable: I grew to love baseball and I became a fan of the Mets (for a little while), something else more profound happened that night.
I now view my first night at Shea as a pivotal moment in my own racial and gender formation. That ordinary Mets/Giants game in 1979 deepened my fascination with baseball. Even though Blue lost that night, the sight of the black pitcher in that loud 1970s orange, black, and white Giants uniform cemented my love for the game. Like Reggie, Vida had his own style, right down to his utterly unique name. More importantly, I was compelled by the notion of a black pitcher. The pitcher position, somewhat akin to the position of quarterback in football, was racialized as white because pitching was, and still is, still viewed as a skill that relies more on "intelligence" than "athleticism." In other words, black athletes were often viewed as not being "smart enough" to be pitchers. Soon after that game, I began to play Little League baseball. I decided that I wanted to be a pitcher and that I wanted to wear my uniform just like Vida, to the point that I cut off the bottom of my stirrups and got my mother to sew the elastic bands that I cut off from my "tighty-whitey" underwear on them so that they could stretch high over my calf-just like Vida's. That was about as close as I could get to "be like Vida," because I never did develop his blazing fastball.
So what is the point of this story? Aside from putting my own little nostalgia out there, I think the larger point I am trying to make is that sports spectatorship (like all forms of spectatorship) shapes our own process of self-identification (a point that has been made by feminist/queer theatre scholars). What drew me to baseball was yes, the game itself, which I love to this day. But what also attracted me to the game was that moment of identification with Vida Blue. That cool night at Shea almost 30 years ago was a key moment in my own self-identification as a black man. I did not come to embrace a black male identity simply because of an encounter with racism, although that did play a role. I was drawn to it because Vida and Reggie made it attractive to the little boy who was growing up in the immediate post-Black Power era with his hand-me-down fistpicks. I was utterly compelled by the majestic black male athlete dressed up sharp in his uniform hurling fastballs at the plate. The sports fan industry, such as the Yankee nostalgia machine, often celebrates white male stars like Whitey Ford, "Joe D.," and "the Mick," while obscuring the team's well-documented history of racial exclusion. Sports spectator stories, like the millions that have come out recently around the closing of New York's baseball stadiums, present themselves as supposed truths of the everyfan, rather than what they are: tales of white male racial and gender formation.
Sports spectatorship is not just about entertainment. It allows us to figure out who we are and who we aspire to be.