Old Muggsy always did have a talent for getting straight to the point.
“Gentlemen, no matter who wins, the champion of the world for this year will be the city of New York,” John J. McGraw said, early in the afternoon of Oct. 5, 1921, as a thirsty nation closed in on the second anniversary of the Volstead Act that ushered in Prohibition, and a starving city prepared to close the book on 16 straight years without a baseball champion.
McGraw’s Giants were the champions of the National League for a sixth time since 1901 and Miller Huggins’ Yankees had won the American League for the very first time, and that meant the capital of baseball wasn’t just New York but the small corner of New York known as Coogan’s Bluff, bounded by 155th Street, Frederick Douglass Boulevard and the Harlem River Drive.
“It’s been too long,” McGraw said to a swarm of newspapermen on the field at the Polo Grounds, home yard for both teams in ’21, a couple of hours before Game 1 of the first Subway Series ever played. “And look what happens when we let other cities have their hands on it.”
The press folks laughed. McGraw was referencing Chicago’s Black Sox, who won the 1917 Series (against McGraw’s Giants), threw the 1919 Series and were all permanently expelled from the game in 1920. (Nobody pressed McGraw on the wee small fact that years before, he’d been partners in the billiard-hall business with Arnold Rothstein, the man everyone knew had fixed that Series.)
The Giants won that last-ever best-of-nine Fall Classic five games to three, they held Babe Ruth to but one home run, they won McGraw his second of three world championships, and all seemed right with the world: New York’s long baseball nightmare was over. Sixteen years was more than enough.
Ninety-nine years later, we who love baseball in this city can certainly agree with fiery old Muggsy: it’s been too long. It has been, in fact, nine empty Octobers since New York last called the Commissioner’s Trophy its own.
If that trend continues and we see an even 10 when someone else is holding a parade in some other city this autumn, it will officially be the longest drought since there were 16 teams, 10 cities, zero teams west of St. Louis and as many citizens of color playing in the major leagues.
The closest we’ve ever come to double figures since the Giants defeated the Yankees in 1921 was from 1986 — when the Mets won 116 games but needed the stars to align in wickedly unexpected ways in win No. 115 — to 1995, when the first embers of a burgeoning Yankees dynasty were doused with cold water in Seattle and the Mets were right in the middle of a lost decade of futility.
It was the ’96 Yankees — maybe the most feel-good team we’ve had around here since the ’69 Mets — who ended that dry spell and ushered in a golden time in New York baseball that culminated — but didn’t end — with the 2000 Subway World Series. It was the ’69 Mets, in fact, who’d helped keep that streak alive by serving as a bridge between Yankees titles in 1962 and 1977.
It was Joe Torre, at the peak of his powers, back in the summer of 2001, who said, “When I grew up here, that was one thing you could always count on. Someone was going to win a championship. Usually it was the Yankees. But the Dodgers and the Giants took their turns, too. It was like a great buffet, and you could never get full from it.”
Have we been spoiled? Sure we have. But what the heck: we like to think of ourselves as a basketball city, but the teams we root for have belied those beliefs. We sometimes talk about football overtaking our attention, but given the sorry state of both local teams the past few years that’s hard to say with a straight face.
But there is no denying that we are a baseball town — that we are (sorry, St. Louis) the baseball town, that we own all 27 of the Yankees’ titles, and the first four of the Giants’, and both of the Mets’, and the first of the Dodgers’. That is our history. That is our legacy. That is who we were. That is who we are. Baseball Town.
“You don’t realize it until you’re really in the middle of it,” Mickey Callaway said this spring, “but there isn’t a place anywhere else that combines caring for their teams with absolute knowledge of their teams, and the sport. It really is unique.”
The Yankees are a fine bet to give us a puncher’s chance this October after spending two years interning behind the Astros and Red Sox. The Mets almost ended our annoying little famine at six back in 2015, when they chartered an unexpected path to the Series, and they still have enough pitching to let you dream, enough hitting to augment that dream … and enough recent history that every sentence uttered about them begins the same way:
“If they can stay healthy …”
If they can stay healthy … and if the Yankees can get just enough starting pitching … and if Callaway grows into the job as it seems he has across this spring … and if a couple of MVP candidates (Aaron Judge? Michael Conforto?) emerge on either side of the Triboro … and if the Yankees bullpen (even shorthanded to start) can be as epic as it seems … and if Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard can combine for 70 starts and give the Mets a legit Seaver/Koosman throwback year … and if the Yankees can ward off the Sox and win the division … and if the Mets can outlast the Phillies, Braves and Nationals atop a crowded NL East …
Well, that’ll give us a shot, won’t it?
And isn’t that all you can really ask for? Because Muggsy McGraw was right in 1921 and he’d be right in 2019.
It’s been too long.
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