 Sam Eifling is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. |
So I was flipping through the sports channels on cable last night and heard something mentioned about both major league baseball teams in New York City meeting to play in the World Series.
Who knew? Is this the first you’ve heard also? Shouldn’t someone have been preparing us for the possibility of this so-called “Subway Series,” so called because people go back and forth between games via an underground train called the subway?
What would it be called if there were a transit strike? The Drive Across Town Series? The Take Off Work Early to Walk Series? The Rickshaw Series? It would just be crazy. Thank goodness for subway tunnels. Seven million rats can’t be wrong.
I just wish someone had covered this earlier, because it must be historic on some level. Doesn’t this qualify as a big deal? I mean, how often do two teams from the same town play in something as huge as the World Series?
It can’t have happened more than a couple of times ever. Maybe around the turn of the last century, when there were four teams in Boston, two in each of the five boroughs and three in Jersey City. Still, I haven’t heard a single New Yorker so much as mention this upcoming Series.
It is too bad this isn’t happening in Chicago. Imagine a World Series between the Bulls and the Bears. Michael Jordan vs. Mike Ditka. For whom would we root? I would take Ditka.
At least those of us who live in Chicago — or just north — could see baseball this late in the year. The last time great postseason baseball was played in Chicago was for that movie “Rookie of the Year” back in 1993. What a great movie. Just picture the Cubs in the Series!
Then John Candy died a year later. That sort of put a damper on things. He sure was funny.
But back to the Subway Series. This must be the most incredible event in the history of sports, because there are so many people in New York, and they are quite rich and quite loud. How could we not watch?
Has there ever been a more monumental occurrence? Surely not since the co-No. 1 Notre Dame and Nebraska football teams played for the national championship as a Super Bowl halftime show back in 1962. Or when my freshman-year dorm intramural floor hockey team won a game. Or the last time a child learned to read.
I wish I were in New York for this shebang. Tickets to the games can’t be that hard to come by, because nothing is hard to come by in New York, especially muggings.
It would be fun just to sit in your $1,500-a-month one-room apartment and watch it on TV, knowing that you could procure cocaine or prostitutes within minutes through the yellow pages, knowing you’re in the greatest city in the world, king of the hill, top of the heap.
New York must be great — else why would they hold the World Series there and only there? It probably has something to do with the natural greatness of people from New York, which I’m sure will be covered constantly on TV and newspapers and radio and Internet and sandwich boards.
I’m so glad we get another week to pay more attention to New York. As they say in the Big Apple, forget about it!
Yankees in five.
