RIDIN' THE CYCLONES
with Gersh
Kuntzman
---Previous
week's column
Like it oughta be
| |
Cyclone Michael Piercy says he'd play in Beirut. Now, if he could only get a start here in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Papers / Gary Thomas |
For the better part of their existence, the New York
Mets have employed various slogans to nourish fan support. The "Ya' Gotta
Believe" motto of the 1970s gave way to "The Magic is Back" which
eventually yielded to "Baseball Like it Oughta Be."
But on a
gorgeous night in their gorgeous new field of dreams in Coney Island, the
Brooklyn Cyclones were the living embodiment of all three slogans rolled
into one.
Winning in stunning, come-from-behind fashion Monday
night, the Cyclones not only brought professional baseball back to
Brooklyn for the first time in 44 years, but did it in a style that
would've made the Mets' advertising wizards ashamed of
themselves.
For on this opening night, while the Mets were losing
yet another game, baseball like it ought to be was played at the packed
Keyspan Park - a perfect place, where 7,500 fans are huddled so close to
the field they can hear the intoxicating pop of a fastball in a catcher's
glove and see in one glance the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump, the Wonder
Wheel, the Atlantic Ocean, Nathan's, the Boardwalk and a few acres of
emerald carpet that are as close to heaven as some people ever want to
get.
Before the Cyclones could take the field, of course, the
rebirth of professional baseball in Brooklyn (enough already!) had to be
ushered in by an operating room full of politicians, reporters and
hangers-on all claiming to be the father.
The field was lousy with
people seeking to stamp the word "history" all over a simple baseball game
or practically pulling out dictionaries to help them elucidate the
magical, indefinable beauty of minor-league baseball. Reporters from all
the papers and all the TV stations were there, filling the space around
the ads with cheery stories about the dawning of this Great New
Day.
A crowd of reporters swarmed around Mets owner Fred Wilpon,
the putative father of these Baby Bums, like he was a politician under
indictment, peppering him with questions about the "meaning" of the new
team and what it would "do" for Brooklyn.
Wilpon, glancing up at
the $38-million palazzo that the City of New York constructed for him,
merely answered that the Cyclones would be "great" for the borough once so
famously scorned by its beloved Dodgers. Brooklyn, added the man whose
Mets charge $23 for a mezzanine seat, has been too-long deprived of
"family entertainment."
Meanwhile, team publicist Anthony Nicoletti
was running around trying to lasso players to toss into the media's
hungry, pre-game maw. For the past two weeks, the role of sacrificial lamb
has fallen to Michael Piercy, a reserve outfielder from New Jersey who
leads the league in pre-game interviews, despite still not recording an
official at-bat as a Cyclone.
How's this team coming together? he
was asked.
"We've got great chemistry," the 25-year-old said. "You
could get 12 chemistry professors from Brooklyn College to come here and
they could learn something from us."
Is playing before such big
crowds going to put the guys under a lot of pressure? someone else wanted
to know.
"No," said Piercy. "If you're feeling pressure, you should
be in another business."
Do you think you've got a shot at making
the majors considering you're already 25 years old? another person
asked.
"I don't think about it that way," he said. "I just love
playing baseball. You send me to Alaska, I'll play. You send me to Beirut,
I'll play." (Keep him in Coney, though, and he doesn't play - at least not
yet.)
The evening's eventual hero, catcher Michael Jacobs, was also
holding court. A mere 20-year-old, he didn't say much, except that he was
"hoping" to do his "best" for "the team" and "go out there" and "give it"
his "best shot." (In addition to learning the skills of the game,
minor-leaguers are, apparently, also taught how to talk for a few minutes,
yet say virtually nothing - a skill as valuable as knowing how to read a
pitcher's pick-off move).
But it was clearly an important night. It
must have been: The mayor brought his girlfriend, while billionaire Mike
Bloomberg, the man who wants to replace him, brought his publicist (who
tried, in vain, to get his boss a tan from the glare of TV lights
reflecting off Mayor Giuliani).
Senator Chuck Schumer was there.
Council Speaker Peter Vallone was there. Congressman Jerry Nadler was
there. (The only person who wasn't there was Hillary and her damn Yankees
cap.)
The mayor spoke of the "incredible job" that Wilpon had done
with the stadium, which he called "the first positive thing to happen to
Coney Island in 60 years" (a claim that would be disputed by Coney Island
stalwarts like Dick Zigun at the Sideshow, the folks at Totonno's and
Gargiulo's and Gerald Menditto, who operates the famed Cyclone roller
coaster.)
This is going to be great for Brooklyn," Giuliani said.
"And I say that as a kid who grew up in Brooklyn." (Eyes rolled throughout
the press corps. This reporter was tempted to point out that the
Yankee-loving Giuliani's departure from Brooklyn to the Long Island
suburbs as a kid was actually the first positive thing to happen to Coney
Island in 60 years.)
But the mayor had a point. A full house at a
brand-new stadium would not allow even skeptics to dispute that a dormant
spirit was reawakening in Coney Island.
A minor-league team won't
bring back the neighborhood's glory right away, but on 38 summer nights,
the streets will be swarming with 7,000 more fun-seekers, people who will
line up at Nathan's, ride the Cyclone, hit the beach or just "bump, bump,
bump" their ass off at the disco bumper cars on Surf Avenue before or
after Cyclones games.
Just as Giuliani's one lasting legacy will be
the that New York is, indeed, governable, the Cyclones have already
restored the notion that Coney Island is, indeed, visit-able.
You could
see it in the smiles on the old Brooklyn men's faces on a night when any
man with gray hair and an old Dodgers cap had a TV camera stuck in his
face.
Tom Martorella, 71, was in a box seat with his older brother,
John. Both vividly remember afternoons at Ebbets Field, but their
attachment to Coney Island, where they were born, is even
greater.
"We worked at Luna Park and Dreamland," Martorella said.
"I was on the beach when Luna Park was burning down." He saw the beginning
of the end of Coney Island and now he's enjoying the end of a new
beginning.
"Bringing baseball to Coney Island - my favorite game
and my favorite neighborhood - is the greatest thing I will ever see in my
lifetime," Martorella said. (Diagnosis? Cyclone fever.)
Even all
the over-heated rhetoric couldn't spoil a beautiful night for a beautiful
game. And in the end, even the most hackneyed, overpaid, over-indulged
Hollywood screenwriter couldn't have written a more perfectly cliched
script for the team's opening night victory.
With two outs in the
bottom of the ninth, with a full house looking on, Edgar Rodriguez belted
a fastball over the scoreboard to send the game into extra
innings.
He just missed the "Hit Sign, Win A Suit" advertisement
for Garage Clothing. For a guy earning a mere $880 a month, a new suit
would've been nice, but hitting the sign would've only earned Rodriguez a
double - and the Cyclones a loss.
"It's OK," the man they call
E-Rod said after the game, dressed in a club-hopping chic silver shirt and
tight jeans. "I'm happy I didn't hit the sign."
And if the
Rodriguez bottom-of-the-ninth homer wasn't a good enough Hollywood cliche
for you, the 'Clones won it in the 10th when that least-likely of heroes,
the catcher Jacobs, a guy who had struck out four straight times, drove in
the winning run with a sacrifice.
Still not good enough? Oh, yeah,
to make matters even MORE cliched, the Scrappers intentionally walked
Robert McIntyre to get to Jacobs and his bat full of holes.
He
proceeded to step up to the plate and smack pitcher Nate Fernley into the
loss column.
After the game, Jacobs was so excited that he used the
word "awesome" as a noun, verb, adjective and preposition - all in the
space of five seconds.
"That's the great thing about baseball," he
said, finally putting aside "awesome" for a sentence. "You can go from
goat to hero in one swing."
Another reporter asked him whether he
had a timetable in his head for making it to the big leagues, a question
that rudely implied that winning a game in such an "awesome" manner was
meaningless unless it was also accompanied by a train ticket to
Binghamton, where the Mets' AA team plays.
Jacobs treated the
question the only way it should have been treated, with a smile and a
polite, "I'm not really thinking about that right now. I just want to do
my best and see what happens."
Giuliani was close by, so the
photographers demanded a picture of Hizzoner and the Hero. Jacobs joined
the mayor and got a hearty handshake.
After Giuliani let him go, I
asked Jacobs if it felt better to win the game or meet the mayor of the
most important city on the planet.
The kid just smiled, too polite
to take a reporter's bait.
"Oh," he said, "I don't
know."
He knows. Believe me, he knows.
Gersh Kuntzman will be writing about the
Cyclones all season long for The Brooklyn Papers. He is also a columnist
for The New York Post and Newsweek.com. His Web site is http://www.gersh.tv/.
(July 2/9, 2001 Issue)