Yankee History X (for Xennial): Mentally ready for a Bronx Title, a subway series

Revisiting another time when it was okay to be astride with a Yankees' World Series conquest. Alternate title: they shoot '94 Expos what-ifs, don't they?

Oct 15, 2024

What are you TL;DRing about: the start of MLB’s Fyra Fest, the Mets-Dodgers, Guardians-Yankees pennant playoffs. Click the headline for the full post.

It is fun imagining that the image of Wade Boggs on a horse makes Aaron Judge get on his horse when he has to run after a long drive to the outfield gaps.

Visualization, eh?

The current Yankees are trying to win that 28th World Series title. Perhaps that sent the mind’s-eye reeling to 28 years ago, Boggs getting on a police horse late one night in October 1996, after another Yankees crew ended a relatively lengthy title drought in the South Bronx.

It was a moment of Fan Zen. One rode with a notion a true fan knows to accept the bad guys win every once in a while — and show that they are not all bad.

Those ’96 Yankees had Jimmy Key, David Cone, Cecil Fielder, and Tim Raines… they took in Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry as both tried to get to a sober lifestyle… definitely not the bad guys to your hoser hardball enthusiast. Besides, they were the first Yankee league pennant winner since 1981.

It was a scramble to see the closeout game of that 1996 World Series, on account of being a shy and cash-limited first-year university student. Stories about lengths Xennials had to go to before streaming are always good.

Boggs on a Horse is a writing device. Perhaps there is a faint line from it to John Mullaney’s “Horse In A Hospital” comic allegory. Or not… go with a not.

It was a vibe, and the 2024 Yankees might have a similar one. Or, just to hedge, it might be the 2024 Mets. What are the New York Mets, but a farty horse?

It is about the mental skills

The Yankees do not need to use the Boggs on a Horse analogy. A minute or so of doing your research turns up the when and why of the New York Yankees building a mental conditioning department.1

The Yankees’ first mental skills hire was Chad Bohling in 2005. That means his hiring was a reaction to Reverse the Curse. The 20th anniversary of that is coming up. It was the Boston Red Sox’ never-done-before-in-baseball, never-done-since comeback from 0-3 down against the Yankees. This was third-act George M. Steinbrenner III, realizing his grandbabies act out since they cannot articulate some unmet need.

Hey, remember how Alex Rodriguez tried to slap the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove that time?

The Yankees, per a leading moneymag, are now valued at $7.1 buh-billion. That covers an entire pit crew to help repair gear between the ears. A bloc of unblockers when Judge, Juan Soto, or Gerrit Cole is in their feelings after an Oh-fer or too much self-doubt. They hear go out and have fun with it; the sun will come out tomorrow. It would be too honest to add: Did you know that once a sports franchise hits a level of ubiquity and profitability, it almost always ceases to win championships? Hey, how ’bout those Dallas Cowboys?

Remember, though, winning is fun, so play to win. And don’t mention that last part to Jerry Jones. We need the memes!

The joy of winning prompted Wade Boggs to hop on an NYPD mounted-unit horse that night.

A police horse is a show of force, but being on horseback is also good for the insides. There are multiple clips of it floating around and he always says he has no idea how he got on the horse. He just knew it was something special. The Yankees had ended a 16-season World Series title drought dating from their last win in 1978; the current team is standing on 14.2

It was someone having fun with it, showing baseball allows for more of the nonsensical than the other sports. Shohei Ohtani can have his dog do a “first pitch,” but has the NFL let a dog be part of a ceremonial kickoff? Not as of yet.

Those Yankees drew sentimental hygiene for Reasons. It is worth getting into since MLB’s final four, or Fyra Fest is laden with potentialities broadcasters call “a historic matchup” without explaining the true history.

National League pennant playoff, New York Mets vs. Los Angeles Dodgers, tied 1-1 AKA the half-sibling rivalry between redheaded stepchild and the golden child. Of course, Francisco Lindor hit a leadoff home run to end the Dodgers’ record-tying 33-inning postseason shutout streak in a shutout win in Game 1. It is an effective best-of-5 with the next three games on the east coast.
American League pennant playoff, Cleveland Guardians vs. the New York Yankees, AKA a Meet The In-Laws battle.
Three of four possible matchups are a Shohei Series or a Mets-Yankees Subway Series. Too easy for the promotion.

A cynical bastard almost always roots for the World Series matchup that stacks up as an engagement killer for MLB and FOX. Those who live by dinosaur metrics, i.e., national TV ratings and regional blackouts, earn their shade, and whatever meteor might hit. Mets-Guardians is probably that matchup.

The salience if it was Mets-Cleveland would be easy for the NFL, NBA/WNBA, and even the NHL. Lindor, who is the Mets’ director of fun, leadoff batter, and shortstop, broke in with Cleveland for his first five seasons.

His one-time double-play partner, Cleveland third baseman José Ramírez, is a Guardians leader. They almost did it together in Cleveland in 2016, when Cleveland blew a 3-1 series lead against the Chicago Cubs. They had their career years at the same time.3

Use links below to save image. — Remind Blue Jays fans of what was wrong with the Home Run Jacket…

One of MLB’s Great Fails is that it refuses to admit fans identify with players. And fan culture needs to give space for people who switch allegiances because of how a top player’s time ended.

There is no excuse for not trying to trade in personalities. Somehow the NFL susses out just enough of a personality, or a lack thereof, to have fans choose sides with quarterbacks.

Shohei Ohtani brought his star power from Japan. Also, his appeal is he run-creates and pitches. When he cannot pitch he is ridiculously good at run creating. Sunday, he had a routine flyout where he hit a pitch too close to the end of his bat, and it was still a 391-foot flyout.

It is too hard for MLB if the best player is not hooked into one of the sport’s semiconductors, the Yankees, or their main antagonist. So the presentation becomes banalysis, John Smoltz explaining how 2-and-1 counts differ from 1-and-2, and the same thing he said for the last 14 hitters.

Choose Your Fighter

It is about how you picked your Player 1, and how liking her/him/them speaks for you. Did you go with someone who had already been winning, or someone destined to, or someone whose career might never line up just right?

Forty-ish years ago, the NBA realized first that sports consumption was shifting to Choose Your Fighter. Video gaming was around and deserves credit.

Basketball clued into this around 1984, the very year Commissioner David Stern saw Cheryl Miller and Team USA at the LA84 Olympics, and clued in there should be a WNBA the next generation of hoops queens, and then the next-gen that has Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese.

The NFL made that all about the quarterback, and is spinning it off to wide receivers and tight ends, who are just taller, wider, and generally whiter receivers. The next streaming series will be edge rushers. That fractured tibia the Detroit Lions’ Aidan Hutchinson suffered on Sunday? Merely Origin Story, mes amis.

The NHL does the star system with an up-nod to the entire dressing room. Canadian media partners, since the ’90s/early aught, have honed the Art of Bourque-ing, ad nauseam. Since a Canadian-based team winning the Stanley Cup is verboten in the Gary Bettman Business Model, and the NHL playoffs last till the summer solstice, zinging heartstrings are the play.

Make it about what the head coach and their 22 or 23 forwards, d-men, and goalies gave up to lift Lord Stanley’s mug. As a fan, you find touchstones. Be happy for communities who get their Day With The Cup. The Cup still comes back to Canada. Players who have won Cups in other minor pro and specialty leagues get their day, too.

However, MLB refuses to do it. It stays with the surface-level splash, which the Lindor-led Mets are doing and then some, has slowly become acceptable. The critical path was created nine years ago. José Bautista flipped a bat, and maybe that was too much, but what if we did this instead?

However, even there, baseball is decades behind the cultural curve.

Old heads in football and basketball made peace long ago with individual flair. If it took a celebration dance to play loose and free, then go for it.

A language barrier is sometimes brought up. However, MLB has had decades to get used to many of its stars being of a place where Spanish is spoken more than English.

Awkwardness, still

And, in the event, of a Mets-Guardians series, the Lindor angle brings up even more uncomfortable truth. His move fits into the half-finished biz model MLB has settled into.

Some combo of analytics and late capitalism has ruined free agency. The latter was the mechanism that got Wade Boggs into pinstripes and on that police horse.

Only a handful of teams on the coasts and in Texas still pay the shot for a top free agent, if a player ever gets to the open market. Baseball was the first sport to have real free agency, and it used to be fun on a bleak day, to hear over the radio that a big free agent had signed.

Back then, the 1990s hot stove league would remind a mopey young adult in downtown Kingston, walking among all those grey limestone buildings, under slate skies, that fall and winter blahs are temporary. Spring and baseball, in full colour, would come again. The years and terms were not scary to a young and open mind. Good for him, you would think.

There was no pretending there was any loyalty; a good life lesson.

The Blue Jays are on a coast. They should be big spenders in development and acquisitions. They really are out of excuses.

The trouble now is MLB has, encouraged teams just changing game pieces once one gets too pricey. Somehow, it became acceptable that a dozen or more teams are wired not to keep every diamond they hold in their hand. They should listen to the Fan who is grounded and shudder-laughs at weak spin control such as “(we) turned 14 years of control into 42 years of control.”

5.113

The numbers in one row of the Salaries section in Lindor’s life box4 illustrate the way it effin’ goes. The 5.113 represents Service Time — five seasons, 113 days. He was moved by Cleveland just before he could have become a free agent. The Cleveland and Tampa Bay-type operations used to trade such a talent in the hope of getting a younger version. Now they try to buy out their peak earning years with long contracts but still don’t keep enough players to have a hope of winning the World Series without extraordinary luck.

Cleveland decided it could only pay Ramírez5 or Lindor.6

Indeed, the Mets’ ante for Lindor included Andrés Giménez, now Cleveland’s second baseman.7

They no longer underpay a player through their Team Control Years. The player is signed until he asks to be moved, probably to a Coastal Elite team.

The Royals, for instance, have talismanic shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. under contract until he is 30.8 However, they, or any team that hits on two or three generational talents who come of age at roughly the same time, must decide whether they can keep ’em all. It happens in the NHL with Commissioner Gary Bettman’s hard salary cap. And what if an organization pulls the wrong lever when facing the Chára-Redden test?

And the Blue Jays’ example of 42 years of control? Five years later, the only tangible return is José Berríos, a good No. 3 starting pitcher (SP). One of the ‘pieces’ from those 2019 deals, fellow righty SP Simeon Woods Richardson, was part of the ante in ’21 to get Berríos from the Twins.

Oct. 26, 1996: It is about the money

Looking back, Boggs on a Horse might have been a victory lap for reality over whatever Selig dime-store-mentality destructiveness. The strike issues were never really half-resolved 18 months earlier.

Those ’96 Yankees were up to the job of holding Atlanta to a ‘one-peat.’ That would be a transitive win for a Blue Jays diehard — protecting Toronto’s distinct status for having back-to-back champions.

As well, the entire postseason had been one proof that it was about the money. The World Series matched the No. 1 and No. 3 payrolls. At the LCS stage, the Yankees beat the No. 2-payroll team, the wild-card Orioles, who had opened the playoffs by defeating Cleveland, who had tallied a MLB-most 99 wins with its No. 4 payroll.

The 1996 Expos were No. 28 in payroll and posted an 88-74 record. Nine seasons later, they would be gone. Oakland averaged 93.76 wins per 162 games from 2018 till ’21, and then principal partner John Fisher decided to pursue this Las Vegas fantasy.

That is where being a Cleveland Guardians-like franchise leads. They have 90-win seasons and playoff appearances, but their attendance rankings have trace elements of Expo-dom.

Survival story

The profile of the ’96 Yankees roster resembles a port in a storm. Half their top dozen contributors have a different team’s hat in their life box.9 They weren’t quite the group that later won four consecutive pennants and three World Series in a row.

At least 10 players performed at a superstar level for at least one or two seasons — Boggs, Cone, Key, Gooden, Strawberry, and Raines; rookie shortstop Derek Jeter, and on to late-season add Fielder, Kenny Rogers, and Mariano Rivera. A lot of the acquisitions are from teams that could not or would not pay the going rate after the strike.

A 19-year-old baseball nerd in first-year university could not put that all together. All that mattered for a Xennial was they had never seen the Yankees in the World Series, and they had to beat Atlanta.

That ginger goober had seen the Blue Jays win back-to-back, then read all sorts of anti-labour agitprop from Bud Selig in Milwaukee, and John Harrington of Boston about how the way the Blue Jays represented Everything Wrong With Baseball. They were supposedly a Create-A-Team, even though other teams had been signing free agents and winning World Series titles since Reggie Jackson signed in New York in 1977.

However, Pat Gillick’s general managing genius was that once he stopped being ‘Stand Pat’ and took the gloves off, he played for keeps. This is where sport is the infinite game. You set up the game pieces, let accretion accumulate, and know when you need to go for it.

Around the time I was first old enough to understand what baseball was, the Blue Jays went on an 11-season run as a divisional dynasty. The American media have never got that. Much of the Canadian media at the time, translating from hockey where every team made the playoffs then, never quite got it.

Fast-forwarding to 2024, I wonder if whoever is left in whatever is left sports media in Canada only appreciate the second World Series title in 1993. It is as if the Joe Carter home run against the Phillies’ Mitch Williams was their first baseball memory. It was in a home game and happened before midnight.

Silly solipsists. This is an infinite game. When Carter hit that walk-off home run, it was just a callback to Labour Day weekend in 1988 when Carter’s cleanup-spot predecessor George Bell walked it off against Mitch Williams. Different stakes, sure, but baseball is baseball.

A raw, late-teenhood suspicion, acked up with receipts by Baseball-Reference.com now, is that the Blue Jays’ success broke the brains of some people high up in Major League Baseball. They could accept the Yankees, L.A. Dodgers, or St. Louis Cardinals having the highest payroll. However, the management babble in 1994 was about the Canadian team and their US$55-million payroll.

Fear of a foreign invasion, some bad hombres. In what other space do you hear about that?

Remember, the lead negotiator for 28 MLB teams is Harrington, president of the Red Sox. And the acting commissioner, Selig, is principal partner of a team that was in the seven-team AL East with the Jays. Their teams were not keeping up with the Jays in the standings, or at the turnstiles.

And the Yankees? At least they were still paying stars, but averaging almost a manager change for year showed they could not to be taken too seriously.

Suffice to say, they trashed what should have been a glorious moment. Stodgy old baseball had World Series flags flying north of the border before the visionary NBA even established its pivot foot in Canada. And MLB threw it away to try to get a salary cap.

And, on top of that, the first Canadian-based team was in cahoots with the Selig scheme. Either it was delulu or a desperate lack of liquid capital. Regardless, it is bonkers that people get wistful about what might have been in 1994 when the team’s chief exec had other priorities.

The ’94 Expos manager Felipe Alou said this in 2019.

After the strike, they broke up that team just because of money. Our club president, Claude Brochu, was a promoter of playing with replacement players. He was on the committee that recommended that for baseball. (ESPN.com, Aug. 12, 2019)

How great must it have felt to Alou to point out the fairly obvious in a national publication after 25 years?

1994: The Big Lie

That above-linked piece by Tim Kurkjian gets about 72 percent of it right with how upside-down MLB was in the early 1990s, entirely by its hand.10 And how it looked to a superfan geographically situated about halfway between Toronto and Montréal.

Remember, there were Collusions I and II. There was a lockout in 1990, and a looming sense that, Selig “had a salary cap on his mind. And he was going to show everyone how to get it.”11 Meantime, the Blue Jays had a different tack.

What was it called? Oh, yes, TRYING!

Also, MLB had an even more egregious own goal. There was a switcheroo in the late 1980s when MLB and the NBA switched TV partners. Suddenly basketball, the game of youth culture, was on NBC, which had most of the popular sitcoms. And baseball was on old-skewing CBS.

Disastrous. So, by 1993 and ’94, MLB’s hierarchy was the SNL “Roundball Rock” sketch. The lead negotiators were coming with tiny hammers and gasoline because they thought it might go that way. Burn it all down, Buds!

Expos were terminal before ’94

Oh, and please stop saying the 1994-95 strike ‘killed the Expos.’ That is just a route on Convenient Narrative Rail.

The patient’s diagnosis dates to a decade earlier. Try Dec. 10, 1984, a legend moved out for years of control. You know who it was.

Or look up Andre Dawson and that blank contract. Or Tim Raines and collusion and May 2, 1987.

Or around Labour Day 1990, when the founding partner of the team, Charles Bronfman, let it be known he wanted out. There was not a mad rush of potential angel investors and saviours. Instead, a consortium emerged!

Or as one Montrealer later put it, “Bronfman put his driver in charge of the Expos.”

That is where the bitterness and sadness should be with nos amours, Les Expos. That Canada and Québec have such a risk-averse ruling class, and so little willingness to point out to Americans that their athletes love it up here… Canada is slightly different economically yet it has much to offer the five major men’s pro team sports and the three or more women’s sports.

The team and fanbase cannot be blamed for the terrible timing.

The ball team went up for sale while there were:

(i) a recession and a low Canadian dollar;
(ii) Prime Minister Brian Mulroney bringing in an unpopular sales tax (the GST, now HST) during a recession, which shredded his party’s fragile Québec-Ontario-western Canada coalition but was accepted over time;
(iii) the looming first Persian Gulf War, where Canada sent troops;
(iv) about three different constitutional crises — Meech Lake, the Kanesatake Resistance; also renewed support for Québec sovereignty also meant the business class was looking around hesitantly;
(v) an, uh, unconventional stadium that was not purpose-built for baseball.12

Pepperidge Farms also remembers that CBC report aired just a year and a bit before a 55-tonne concrete beam at Olympic Stadium fell into a walkway. Not to be conspiratorial or anything. Let’s just trail off that the beam fell on Friday the 13th, September 1991. The Expos also lost, whoa, 13 home-game gates from it.

None of that is meant to twist the knife. Expos loyalists were put through enough. It is just a way to switch off from ‘CN Rail.’ There were many cracks and trend-line troubles that appeared before ’94.

Today, the media’s elevator generally gets off at the nostalgia department on the second floor. Hard conversations are a fifth-floor walkup.

True, MLB never fought for Montréal fans even three-one thousandths as hard as it does for say, a mendacious rent-seeker such as Fisher of the vagabond Athletics. It is no consolation that Montréal fans found out first that MLB does not really see the fans as a constituency. Just bring money.

Point being, a Seinfeld line read by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, “There is no ballpark — and the team has relocated” reflected one fan’s reality. By 1991, imagining the two teams meeting in a World Series entailed the Blue Jays facing the Buffalo Expos, the Denver Expos, or the New Orleans Expos.

Sparky Anderson: ‘What about integrity?’

A Canadian conundrum came up during that ’94-95 labour war. One MLB team was in a province where the labour movement was/is spread-out and isolated. One MLB team was in a place where the labour unions were/are much more powerful.

Guess which one was full speed ahead with using replacement players if the strike extended into the ’95 season.

Firstly, of the 26 U.S.-based franchises, the Baltimore Orioles principal partner, Peter Angelos (1929-2024), refused to go along with the replacement players scheme. One dugout manager, Sparky Anderson of the Tigers, took a stand. He was only 61 years in 1995, and would never manage again.

“Strange, but it was the proudest moment of my career. I couldn’t believe grown men who are supposed to have common sense could actually come up with the idea of using replacement players. They were actually going to bring in some guys who never played in eight to ten years and call it major league baseball! What about the history of the game? What about integrity? We were willing to sacrifice our history and everything we believed in all on account of money! Well not me! If the owners thought I betrayed them they missed the whole point. That wasn’t the case at all. The only thing I wouldn’t do was betray baseball. I wasn’t going to try to fool the fans who pay for the games.” (They Call Me Sparky Sleeping Bear Press, 1998)

Then and now, the stance by Anderson was also copacetic with working-class fans. Unionized labour has a strong heartbeat in Michigan and the areas of Ontario — Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie — where the Tigers are more popular than the Blue Jays.

Generally, aside from a few industrial towns, and public sector unions, Southern Ontario and Toronto types have little regard for the value of strong unions.

Norm MacDonald voice: According to your broad brushstrokes, they all think if they show they want to get ahead, they’ll be rewarded by a Benevolent Employer. Or so our envy of Germany’s minimum 6 weeks of vacation would have us believe.

A quiet con

An anomaly in governance gave the Blue Jays an out on using replacement players in 1995. The centre-left New Democrats (ONDP), led by Premier Bob Rae, were in charge for the first (and last) time. During their time, they passed a bill banning companies from using replacement workers during a strike or lockout.

Meantime, in spring 1995 the ranking Canadian in Blue Jays management was president and CEO Paul M. Beeston.13 At the time, he was about to turn 50 years old, a life’s crossroads where one either accelerates toward mad ambition or starts talking about work-life balance and restarting old hobbies.

The Blue Jays are at the peak of their popularity. Running out has-beens, never-weres and never-will-bes in the positions of Carter, Roberto Alomar, Devon Whyte and John Olerud was a non-starter. Someone aspiring to the big chair — Commissioner of Baseball and/or Prime Minister of Canada — cannot have that kind of bad publicity.

It was fine, evidently, that the Rae-led NDP was undermined every which way by the pro-big business unacknowledged legislators of Ontario and their media. It was fine if the next Tory, so-called, government would run on and apply an ideological gobbledygook-strewn anti-worker, anti-intellect agenda that might as well have been written and edited by Newt Gingrich.

So the Blue Jays said, there is a law in Ontario, and we cannot play in Toronto with a replacement team. It was savvy. It also sideswiped Selig, whom Beeston likely saw as competition to completing his loop from ‘Welland, Ont.-born accountant to Commissioner of Baseball.’

Not gonna lie, I bought it. The Jays’ World Series reign was over. At least they didn’t tarnish it with scabs… like the Expos.

The 1990s-vintage Ernestown Secondary School library offered much for a teen with designs on becoming a sportswriter. It got the early editions of The Globe & Mail and Toronto Star. The local Kingston Whig-Standard was in the old Southam chain. Superb local sports coverage from Claude Scilley, Doug Graham, Patrick Kennedy and Ian MacAlpine was contemplated by pick-ups of columnists from every major market except Toronto.

That meant getting to read, for free, columns by Roy MacGregor (Ottawa Citizen), Cam Cole (one of the Alberta papers), Michael Farber, and Jack Todd (Montreal Gazette). The op-ed pages had strongly crafted takes that challenged a reader, most notably from Catherine Swift, then of the Calgary Herald. And Mordecai Richler, trolling the Bloc/Parti Québécois as only he could!

Access to two Toronto newspapers, top columnists from outside the Toronto bubble, a decent hometown broadsheet, and no exposure to the Toronto Sun. Which was great, since gingers need to avoid the Sun.

All along, knowing that union ties are tighter in Québec, I kept looking for a sign that the Expos would not use replacement players. If the Blue Jays and Tigers could register conscientious objections, then surely … well, no.

The 1994 Expos’ top 12 contributors included future Hall of Famers **Larry Walker** (third from left) and **Pedro Martínez** (fifth from right). Source: Baseball-Reference.

The Expos had two future hall of famers on that ’94 team, a heaping handful of all-stars, and, thought, we can use a replacement team and people will not mind. Apologies to my Grade 10 French teacher Carmel Blackett and Steely Dan, ils ne reconnaîtraient même pas un diamant si vous le teniez dans leur mains...

So, uh, alors non, pas de nostalgie pour les Expos de 1994. Their management’s inaction led to the thought that they might as well leave. They sold out their fanbase.

A hat trick of halted negotiations

Late summer-fall 1994 and early 1995 was a hat trick of arsepains in my cranny of rural southeastern Ontario.

The baseball players went on that defensive strike. That led Bud Selig, et al., say No World Series For You / N’est Pas World Series Pour Vous.

The day after the playoffs were cancelled, the National Hockey League lockout began, meaning no Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays.

The first senior year of high school started with a foreboding since teachers at the three high schools in Lennox & Addington County had been working without a contract. And getting a good one was essential. It would be the last collective agreement they would negotiate with the school board, instead of the province.

There was a tight window to make a deal. Rae’s NDP was drawing out the days till they would have to call an election, and likely lose power. The other options were the eternally-lukewarm Ontario Liberals, or a Tory-austerity government made up of Maggie Thatcher fanboys, fangirls, supported by the eternally Tory Blue farm vote.

One sensed that the OSSTF/FEESO local did not wish to strike.14 They probably sensed, whatever the reasons, they would not have popular support. Short-term, people were still in Recession Mode. Longer view: the backlash against knowledge, that we see now in mind-boggling volumes in 2020s, had begun.15

Being a pawn in a game of lies sealed in having a pro-worker, pro-union default setting. Pay someone properly to do a job; that’s it.

At ESS, they started with work-to-rule, where teachers work to the language of their collective agreement. No extras, no extra-curriculars beyond finishing the fall sports seasons. No taking 32 math tests and grading them at their child’s hockey practice. It also meant the students would be in the halls before the teachers for a few minutes at the start of each school day.

Perhaps this is some false memory. The first few days, when the teachers flowed into the building after massing outside, there was a slow clap. Not by everyone, just spontaneous, just a nod to people digging in against trustees.

It did not keep up. In case you were never a 17-year-old, teenagers are impatient and need near-immediate gratification. The sloganeering fast became, “Strike or sign.”

Read shallowly, it might not have helped. Negotiations are a slow escalation. That is why Michael Scott knows you always start by telling the other party you are declining to speak first.

Granting kindness to our young selves, perhaps it was just a way of saying someone needed to force the play. The entire dispute lasted almost three months, and it felt like a series of soft jabs right in the ’90s-scale idealism.

Good teachers always went that extra kilometre, and the management stalling disrespected their effort. It is not a game. Minor children could sense the emotional costs that would keep costing in the future.

Work-to-rule gave way to rotating strikes. Three schools; so one day Ernestown would be out, then the other high school, and then the high school teachers at the community high school up in Cloyne.

Years from that point, Steve Rushin wrote a wonderfully evocative column about how children in the snowy states (and provinces!) got word of a snow day. They got the news over the radio… you bound downstairs to hear a radio anchor read the alphabetical list of school closings. The tension is almost unbearable.16

Well, it is fun to imagine we learned about strikes on local morning radio. Except, well, it was November, that time of year in Canada and northern states where it is just pitch-black early, and there is no snow.

After a month or so of that, the school board locked out the teachers. Christmas vacation that year started on Dec. 9 and lasted till about Jan. 18. There is only so much ball hockey and so much The Price Is Right a 1990s pre-Internet teenager can take.

The tension was unbearable. And one took notes with his gut and arteries about what was causing it, and who stood to benefit.

Page ahead to September 1995, the start of another school year. By then, Ontario Premier Mike Harris was coming in hot, and his education minister John Snobelen had been caught out saying they would “create a crisis in education in order to gain public support for reform.”17

That same play, Chaos Politics, is run every time, over and over. It has made teaching an unattractive profession, especially to men. That guy who used to make a good teacher and good coach is probably a police officer now, wondering why he is taking mental health distress calls at 4 a.m., and standing in an emergency room talking about fantasy football trades. All of this undermines trust in proven social goods.

Get people to believe the state of affairs is so awful that it has to be made worse, and then ta-da, it will be fixed. It never works. What happens is people who can buy their way out of it, i.e. send their children to private schools, will have found the exit door.

That is not far removed from how a sports league’s negotiators carry on when collective bargaining breaks down, at least 30 years ago. The Chair Bud team believed baseball was on the eve of financial destruction.

In reality, the only team to utterly fail was the one-and-done 1969 Seattle Pilots, who were acquired and renamed the Milwaukee Brewers by (checks notes) Bud Selig.

Why salary caps suck

‘Millionaire players against billionaire owners’ was good CN Rail. It simply was not true. The labour stoppages are usually about a majority of team operators trying to rein the team who is willing to invest in players, and all the bells and whistles.

There is a time and place for salary caps — in a small-scale league.

Pitching one in baseball, the oldest pro sport in the Western world, was absurd. People go to baseball games for many reasons. There is a cross-generation, out-of-time connection that exceeds the other sports. You should be able to enjoy a game without feeling inadequate for not knowing a player’s Salary Cap Hit or Average Annual Value.

In the NHL, those are practically the first points of reference for an NHL player. The NHL and other sports have gone so far down the line Neal Pollack satirized two decades ago.18 Someone born in the mid-1990s only has firsthand experience with the cap world. And, in so torpidly trying to earn their GM Hat, they have mostly stopped watching the games and writing about what works and what could be improved. What was good to see for its own sake.

So the laissez-faire, luxury-tax MLB system sort of works. It needs fine-tuning. It must root out the shady operators of NFT teams. It also needs to have a schedule of rewards for teams that are doing right by developing players. And, holy shit, does it ever need a hard conversation about having teams in climate-threatened regions.

This is another post. Since MLB hostilely took over Minor League Baseball (MiLB) under the cover of COVID-19, it has the leverage to bring promotion-relegation to North America. The kind of capitalists who could buy into an AAA team and try to get it promoted to the American or National league might be more entrepreneurial and spirit than whoever can pull together $1.5 buh-billion in financing to purchase the Minnesota Twins.

And, if the path where Cleveland or Pittsburgh makes a star and the New Yorks take him is to continue, then it needs to be rewarded. Allocate more money for signing bonuses to top amateurs when a team helps Lindor, or Paul Skenes, live up to his projections.

Resourcefulness and resources are not the same. Speaking of resourcefulness, some of that was needed to watch the climax game of that ’96 series, as a first-year university student without his own TV, in days before streaming. There would be a scramble drill.

Wade Boggs has the WAR and memes

First, though, pour one out for how Wade Boggs, or someone advising him, made him a meme-orable baseball star. No player, in the AL/NL annals ‘onboarded’ a career .415 without being a power threat, to the count of a .443 slugging percentage.19

Getting on the horse was just one of a few good choices that put him in the cultural lexicon of a certain type of fan.

He appeared in one of Cheers’ “Bar Wars” episodes. To resolve an escalating prank war, rival tavern keeper Gary re-routes Boggs to sign autographs for the gang. Sam Malone, as a Red Sox alumnus, is conveniently not in there when the gang’s paranoia blinds them to the fact Wade Boggs has walked into Cheers.20 Boggs was also one of Mr. Burns’s “nine ringers” in the classic-era The Simpsons episode “Homer At The Bat.” Once again, an as-himself Boggs is waylaid in a bar — getting punched out by barfly Barney Gumble in an argument over who was England’s greatest prime minister.

— Pitt The Elder!
— LORD PALMERSTON!!

Boggs has shared a theory of why he got on the horse. He has told comic Bert Kreischer that the Yankees players initially expected fans would storm the field after the victory was secured. Ten years earlier, he had been on the Red Sox team that was in that scenario after the New York Mets wrapped up the 1986 World Series.

When Boggs was a rookie in 1982, the Milwaukee Brewers won their first (and only) league pennant. If you find the clip and pause it at 20 seconds, the field invasion includes A Guy Carrying A Beer Cooler.

By the mid-nineties, celebratory field invasions in North America were scrubbed and sanitized away. The Yankees, following the lead of Cal Ripken Jr. when he set the consecutive-game streak in 1995, opted for a victory lap. That got Boggs on the back of the horse, to make a memory.

Scramble drill

Now, the scramble part of getting to see it live, when you still had to see things live, involves trying to find a TV on a Saturday night as a budget-conscious student.

One was supposed to be at university to study and learn. But, baseball…

Silly as it sounds, Atlanta needed to be stopped. A repeat would further erase the ’92-93 Blue Jays. In the Ongoing Story of Baseball, there is only room for one type of team per era. That would have seemed silly to mention to anyone around me, and at that point, 50 days into starting university, I hadn’t found anyone trustworthy.

Atlanta looked the part of a dynasty. They won a World Series in 1995 with Tom Glavine sculpting a combined one-hit shutout in the clincher. That ’96 team might someday have six Hall of Fame players — the Greg Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz pitcher troika, and Chipper Jones, Fred McGriff, and possibly Andruw Jones.

They were down to their last leg in the pennant playoff. Then they got hot, winning five in a row to put away the Cardinals and take the first two World Series games in Yankee Stadium. Sports Illustrated said the aggregate scoreline — 48-2 — “sounded like Steve Spurrier settling a grudge,” referring to the Florida Gators college football coach.

Great, the favorite is ahead 2-0 with the next three games at home. That just raised the bile. Atlanta was the locus for some U.S. media shenanigans committed by NBC, mostly, during the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Donovan Bailey of Canada won the men’s 100-metre run, and NBC and Bob Costas just could not let it stand. He had to proclaim 200-400 double gold winner Michael Johnson had supplanted Bailey, since his 200m time, divided by two, equalled a shorter span than the Canadian’s 9.84 in the 100.

Picture my then 15-year-old sister snapping at the TV. “He (Johnson) starts the second 100 already sprinting!” None of us ran track, but my sister aced physics.

It was junk math and junk sports science. Anyway, Costas is not without his charms. Donovan Bailey later pointed out that at a big sports event, ‘national broadcasters’ —generalists — are only worth listening to, to the extent one gives them oxygen. Bailey said something akin to ‘it was someone who does not cover track talking while a lot of people were listening.’

Cue the comeback

Well, you know what happened over the next three weeknights in Atlanta. It was probably on Sportscenter.

Tues., Oct. 22, 1996: perfect road game

There was a good chance the common-room TV was available for the entire game. In hockey jargon, the Yankees set the tone. Tim Raines led off by walking and scoring for a quick 1-0 lead. He drew the free pass off Glavine, on a 3-and-2 count. His base-stealing legs were gone, ruined by the hard turf in Montréal, but a sac bunt and single brought him around.

Cone was effectively wild across six innings. Jeter set up the breakout by greeting Greg McMichael with a leadoff single into the 5.5 hole to open the eighth. Bernie Williams stepped into a 1-and-nothing pitch for a two-run home run, and it was a series.

Wed., Oct. 23, 1996: Leyritz hits a Carbo bomb

Before my arrival on my new residence floor, a game of honour and diplomacy had taken place over the one shared TV set. Everyone had agreed to chip in to pay the damage deposit on TV, and the monthly basic cable bill.

However, there had been discord over Wednesday nights. Scenario: you are 19-year-old young men in a preppy university’s only all-male residence. To be flirty-fluent, you must watch their TV shows. What should the lone TV be tuned to between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday?

Beverly Hills 90210, followed by Party of Five (FOX/Global);
Some sitcom full of white people, probably (CBS/ABC/CTV)
The Agenda With Steve Paikin, a political panel discussion show hosted by Steve Paikin (TVOntario)21

There had been some prolonged discussion, or so the legend does. Someone played the ‘well we are in university’ card and got right raspberried. However, egalitarian sentiments did have some sway, and once in a while, the political junkies got their fix.

Thankfully, nothing good happened in this game before 10 p.m. ET. The Yankeeologists might still be talking about it. For the second night in a row, Jeter started a three-run chain of hits, bases on balls, and Atlanta errors that cut into a six-run lead. Then a big moment presented itself to Jim Leyritz against the closer, Mark Wohlers. An eye-high slider on 2-and-2. He hit a three-run home run to tie the game, joining a list of droll role players — Bernie Carbo, 1975; Dusty Rhodes, 1954; Ed Sprague, 1992 — who came up big when opportunity knocked.

Raines, turned around as a righty, started the winning 10th-inning rally with a four-pitch base on balls against lefty Steve Avery, the classic starter pressed into a high-leverage relief role.

Atlanta made a dreaded double switch. After Raines scored, manager Bobby Cox made a pitcher and player change to take out McGriff, who had homered earlier. Ryan Klesko, who had played only 12 innings at first base all season, came in and dropped a pop-up to let in a second run.

Thurs., Oct. 24, 1996: Smoltz ’em out

And if you ever wonder why John Smoltz is the way he is about teammates letting down their starting pitcher, whelp, it might have been this night. The current FOX baseball commentator had a scoreless start in the winner-take-all game vs. the Twins in the 1991 World Series, and Lonnie Smith was deked into slowing down on an extra-base hit.

This is also a 1-0 loss where the only run was unearned.

And Atlanta had the tying run at second base, one left turn from scoring, with nobody out in the ninth.

Saturday! Keyless entry for essential Jimmy Key.

Apprehension built across the day. That TV was not going to be free. However, Jimmy Key was going for the Yankees in a closeout game in Atlanta. For a diehard Jays fan, that meant something.

Dave Stieb holds most of the Toronto pitching records and should be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. However, for Xennial-age fans, Key was the dude. He became a starter six seasons later than Key, and it was evident that he had learned how to pitch.

The righty, Stieb, was once described in a book by Stephen Brunt as someone whose “temperament often got in the way of his talent.”22 Key was perfectly low-key, the son of a Huntsville, Ala., engineer who just understood the geometry and vectors of throwing off batters’ timing.

Key was not a big talker, and that probably played well in Canada, too. Being a lefty, in a nation that has a preponderance of hockey players, ballplayers and golfers who swing left, also meant he fit in. In that ’92 World Series, recall, he had (W) next to his name for the last two Jays victories, once starting at home, and coming in to relieve in the clincher.

There could be no picking this up mid-game. The 90210 crowd had jockish leanings, but they didn’t need to watch Hockey Night in Canada, since they were born into the kind of affluence that meant they got taken to Maple Leaf Gardens on the regular. The Agenda faction had decided to make it a Blockbuster night.

So the hunt was on. The largest residence had two rec room TVs. And anyone from the Kingston area knows how to find that one door that does not auto-lock. At Victoria Hall in October 1996, it was the E-wing stairwell, right down to the basement and a TV that was a kind of backup.

Sure enough, with a couple books in hand for the pretense of studying, there was keyless entry. Fake-watch an hour of hockey.

Jimmy Key vs. Greg Maddux, World Series on the line.

Key laboured across 5⅓ innings. He avoided the big mistake. Four-time Cy Young winner Maddux made one big mistake. With the potential first run leading away from third base in the fourth, he put a pitch up on the strike zone that 9-hitter catcher Joe Girardi swatted for an RBI triple.

Atlanta kept the infield pulled in, and Jeter roped an RBI single over his drawn-in counterpart at shortstop, then stole second base uncontested. This was the stuff Jeter supposedly brought to the table every October from 1996 till sometime in the 2010s, but even at age 22, he had it. He scored on a two-out single from Bernie Williams.

The pinch-point was the sixth inning, scoreline at 3-1. Chipper Jones rocked a leadoff double, the kind that so often ignites a big inning. However, in a left-on-left matchup of Jays alumni, Key induced McGriff to tap a groundout. That was his note to exit.

Later, future Expo and future Jay Graeme Lloyd fooled Klesko into a third-out popup when a home run would have put Atlanta in front.

And, as the innings moved along, some company plopped down in the couches around that basement TV. Did any become lifelong friends? No! This ain’t Hollywood, it was a university in Kingston. But they were interested and, after saying they hadn’t watched much baseball since The Strike, said that seeing this game, all the tension, the way the New York crowd was hanging on every pitch, reminded them of what they liked about the sport.

It felt right. Rivera, in his first season as a full-time high-lev reliever, did throw two no-hit no-run innings. The other 21 outs were all covered by hurlers who pitched for Montréal or Toronto at some point in their careers.

It was a good exercise in understanding that baseball is even better when you are hoping for a transitive win — but have a backup plan. Fred McGriff was one of Atlanta’s leading batters in that series. In a timeline where they win, possibly he adds a World Series MVP trophy to his career résumé, and gets into Cooperstown sooner.

Here is hoping this illustrates why it is OK to bandwagon sometimes. Those East Coast evil empires have to win once in a while. The L.A. Dodgers probably still need two World Series titles to end the Playoff Dodgers memes.

And, of course, Wade Boggs hopped on that horse. It was impromptu and silly, and Boggs has said he has a lifelong fear of horses. But it was the New York of some Canadian hick’s imagination. Looking back, it was like something from one of the two late-night talk shows that were ‘live from New York.’

One who had turned out TV could easily picture a ballplayer riding in on a horse to the studio of David Letterman’s Late Show. The studio NBC gave Conan O’Brien for Late Night was too small for a horse, but given his crew’s gift for absurdism and making their entire program a punchline, they could have captured the spirit of the thing.

To think, some students went out to loud bars on Saturday nights. I did do some of that, but that came later and was wholly unmemorable. There was no Wade Boggs on a horse horseplay.

Finally!

If this has a point, it is about neural pathways. Opening yourself up.

Cynicism is easy. Finding a way, as a Blue Jays fan, to latch on to a Yankees postseason run was a no-pressure challenge. It affirmed what was my first sports love. And what I strongly disliked, then and now.

Did it change my loyalties? No. It was like any episode of The Simpsons when Homer is back to resenting Ned Flanders the following week. However, one should look to sports and entertainment as a way to redefine their fun, and not respond to emotionally manipulative cueing in the presentation. The actual games are fun; the level of financialization is what people need to push back against.

Another reason to put this down, in far too many words, was as a memory and dot-connecting exercise. It is good to do that after a recent medical episode where I had changes in behavior, movements, feelings, and levels of consciousness. But I’m feeling much better now.

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