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Blog: Vac's Whacks
CHICAGO — There were a lot of things my father did as a sports fan that probably would get him excommunicated from the sporting church of latter-day complaint.
Even as a kid, while he picked the Yankees (they had the most vowels in the league), he would be just as delighted when the Giants and the Dodgers won, and would later have the same feeling for the team that adopted his native borough of Queens. The World Series was the exception. For all his days, he cited the 1947 Series as the best one ever.
“For one thing, the Yankees won it,” he would say. “And it went seven games. And best of all, the two most prominent Dodgers were named Gionfriddo and Lavagetto.”
UPI
GREAT EXPERIENCE: Robinson Cano signs for Yankees and Cubs fans alike on Friday at Wrigley Field.
My father never believed that it was a fan’s burden — especially a working-man fan — to fulfill a quota of ballpark visits. My entire childhood, 1974 to 1983, 10 years, we took in a total of 20 baseball games together, 10 to see the Yankees, 10 to see the Mets. That was it. Now, we weren’t wealthy enough to afford season tickets, but we weren’t destitute, either. We could have gone to more.
“If you went every day,” he would say, “it wouldn’t be special.”
Funny thing about that: I probably see 100 to 115 games in person now each season, and multiply that by the years, that’s a lot of trips to the yard. And though there are aspects of the journey that are the same as the ones you take to work every day, I still retain the 10-second wonder gasp every time I see a baseball field. I do.
Why? Because my father was right. Going to a game is supposed to be special. Which is why I find it alternately amusing and infuriating when the subject of attendance is raised. From the moment Yankee Stadium opened, there have been wide swatches of unoccupied seats at every game. Same deal at Citi Field. And every so often, it seems as if we are required to conduct a census gauging the continuing commitment of fans and their fandom.
Really? My dad and I may only have taken in those 20 games together live, but I think it’s a fair estimate that we probably watched no fewer than 700-800 games on TV together in those years, listened to another few hundred start-to-finish on the radio.
The problem is, a half-filled ballpark now is supposed to symbolize a Great Depression in sports. The Yankees drew 4 million fans a year their last five years at the old Yankee Stadium. The Mets drew more than 3 million in each of those years, broke 4 million in 2008. We tend to think of that as normal.
It isn’t. For years, the 2.7 million the Mets drew in 1970 was a high-water mark in New York City. The Yankees won 29 pennants between 1921 and 1964; they drew as many as 2 million fans exactly five times in those
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