A little clean-up in Kansas City
By Brian Mason
Last night, I attended a small party to catch up with many of my old high school friends. The late-night affair was relatively uneventful until I began talking baseball with a legitimate Yankee fan. This particular friend and I earned a reputation in our classes for our constant Red Sox/Yankees duels. The climax – or rather the nadir, in my case – came after the Great Grady Little Gaffe as I was forced to don a disgusting Derek Jeter jersey for a day because of a stupid bet.
But last night, the tables had turned. It was the first time I had seen my friend since we left for our respective colleges, so I relished every opportunity to remind him of Boston’s championship. And being the typical Yankee fan that he is, he was in a state of complete denial and was not concerned with New York’s current slide. According to him, it is a guarantee that the Yankees will make the playoffs. He was a pitiful site, wearing a 2003 World Series hat, a Brooklyn sweatshirt and spewing his verbal insanity.
The pinnacle of the night, however, came when he began telling me of his recent trip to Kansas City. His father and he had decided to venture out west to see the Yankees play, "the worst team in baseball." They planned to take their pompous New York show on the road so they could watch their two million dollar team pulverize the Royals. Unfortunately for the traveling fans, they watched as the Yankees were beaten by one of the weakest ball clubs – if one bases such a title on records and statistics.
He described how Royals fans went completely wild as the father and son tandem was heckled mercilessly. For me, however, the payoff of his amusingly redeeming anecdote came when he told me that a Kansas City native actually began sweeping him as he sulked out of the stadium. Predicting a Royals sweep, this fan with an obvious sense of both mockery and justice carried an actual broom into the stadium, only to fittingly clean his city of this Yankee trash (who, at the time, was appropriately wearing an A-Rod jersey.)
Personally, his story was much more entertaining than anything I expected last night. It was a true lesson in irony. But more importantly, it probably had an infinitely more degrading impact than any comment I could have made about last year’s October comeback.
