90% of the Game Is Half Mental: And Other Tales from the Edge of Baseball Fandom

by Emma Span

Overview

"One of the most enjoyable, satisfying sports books I have ever had the pleasure to read." —Jeff Pearlman author, Boys Will Be Boys and The Bad Guys Won! 

Yogi Berra once said: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” But for lifelong baseball aficionado Emma Span, it hasn’t always been that simple. Now, in this winning collection of essays, Span chronicles her love of the sport, from childhood hobby to full-blown obsession, from big break (becoming The Village Voice’s first staff sports reporter in years) to heartbreak (getting a pink slip within a year). She recounts elbowing her way to get a quote from Yankees captain Derek Jeter and waiting for Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez to put some pants on for an interview. She literally gives her lifeblood to see the Mets and hops a plane to Taiwan, home to perhaps the largest concentration of Yankees fans outside of the five boroughs. But after getting laid off and being forced to leave her press pass behind, Span wonders if her passion for the sport will fade. Highly unlikely. Baseball helped Span forge a lasting bond with her father, connect with total strangers, and endure even the toughest times.

With a fresh voice, a devastating wit, and an alarmingly encyclopedic knowledge of the game, Span offers a new perspective on America’s favorite pasttime—as a journalist, a baseball nerd, a daughter, and a fervent stay-until-the-last-out fan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345504876
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/16/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Emma Span has written about baseball for the Village Voice, Slate, the New York Press, and popular blogs like Bronx Banter, among many other publications; yet when she appeared on Jeopardy! in the fall of 2009, she missed an easy question about Mickey Mantle (claiming that "the buzzer timing was really tricky"). She graduated from Yale University in 2003 and now lives in Brooklyn. This is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Either Why You Shouldn’t Gamble

or Exactly Why You Should

I wish I could tell you I spent my childhood playing stickball on the streets of Brooklyn, but in fact I grew up in a New Jersey suburb, and on the rare occasions when I was cajoled or threatened into playing a sport, I was lucky if no one wound up in need of medical attention. My lack of hand-eye coordination is legendary, and while I’ve made it a point to stay as far as possible from my high school since the day I graduated, I imagine people there still talk about the time I tried to play badminton.

I got into baseball the same way most people do: my dad. A native of Providence, Rhode Island, he grew up a bona fide Red Sox fan. But by the time he and my mother settled in New Jersey, after a newspaper career that had taken them to half a dozen cities, from Philadelphia to Boston to New York to Baltimore to Dallas, he’d gone rogue, following the local team wherever he happened to be. After all, in the days before satellite TV, cable, and MLB.com, your far-off hometown team was just a tiny box score in the paper. In the early 1980s my parents finally landed, settling about twenty congested miles from the Bronx, and my dad’s adopted team became the Yankees.

There can’t be many greater betrayals in sports fandom than ditching the Red Sox for the Yanks, particularly back then, when it looked like the Sox would never win another World Series. It seems like the kind of major life change that would require some sort of hearing or paperwork. Every few years, still not quite comprehending, I ask my father whether it wasn’t hard for him to trade in his childhood team for their most despised rivals. His answer is always the same.

“No,” he’ll say flatly. “The Red Sox were a nightmare—a disorder. Autumn itself was ruined because every year it was associated with the Sox’s horrific collapse—every single year. And all the squawking, bitching, and cursing . . . why would I choose to bring that misery into my house?” He wants to be able look at foliage without cringing in pain, he says. “Every year. Dashed expectations, bitterness and depression, an incredible amount of frustration—it’s a disease. I mean that, a disease. I mean . . . every single year. No. I wouldn’t inflict that on my family.”

The Mets were actually enjoying more success than their crosstown rivals back then, in the prelude and aftermath of their 1986 World Series win. But they belonged more to Long Island than to Jersey, Shea was a nightmare drive from our house, and besides, my dad already knew the Yankees’ history front to back—they were nothing if not familiar. Year by year they became more his team, and eventually mine.

Several factors combined in the early-to-mid-nineties to push my fandom to a higher level. First, Bernie Williams came up from the minors to play the outfield, and I loved him immediately—he seemed shy and had big, nerdy glasses, like me, though unlike me he would go on to become incredibly graceful, beloved by millions, and a millionaire. An introverted classical guitarist, he was the first player I imagined I could relate to on a personal level (this was long before the world was exposed to his Muzak-like jazz guitar compositions), and I paid closer attention to the games so I could keep an eye on him and offer my extremely intangible support.

Then in 1993, two things happened: the Yankees traded Roberto Kelly to the Cincinnati Reds for Paul O’Neill, and I hit puberty. O’Neill is an interesting figure, in that probably no other Yankee in the last twenty years has been quite so adored by the home crowd and simultaneously loathed by opposing fans. (It takes a truly dedicated Yankee-hater to work up any real vitriol toward Williams or, say, the milquetoastish Scott Brosius.) O’Neill got to me because he so obviously cared, albeit far too much. He made that abundantly clear every time he followed an out with a furious helmet toss or vicious water-cooler beatdown. If he hit a single, he berated himself, muttering in anguish on first base, for missing the double. Blooper reels to this day show a clip of him fumbling a catch and, overwhelmed by self-disgust, kicking the ball back to the infield.

Other teams watched these petulant displays with distaste—after all, many players care just as deeply as O’Neill without feeling compelled to prove it via Gatorade dispenser destruction after every double play. And George Steinbrenner didn’t help matters by nicknaming him “the Warrior,” which was undeniably cheesy and eventually led to too many Pat Benatar scoreboard montages. None of this bothered me, however. You had to root for him, because it was painful to see anyone as abjectly miserable as O’Neill was when he failed; you feared that if he struck out in a really big spot, it might irreparably shatter his psyche.

Plus . . . he was cute. (Yes, he had what you might describe with technical accuracy as a curly mullet; it was 1993. Don’t judge.)

I hate the popular image of the arrogant, entitled Yankee fan who throws an O’Neill-style fit if his team doesn’t win the Series every year. But although my dad was never a terribly intense fan—he didn’t live or die by the team, or mind missing a game, or explode with joy if they won or rage if they didn’t—to be completely honest, he always had a slightly ruthless, Steinbrenner-esque streak in his fandom. He decided, for example, that Joe Torre was washed up way back in 2002, just one season after he’d taken the team to within an inning of an incredibly dramatic World Series Game 7 win (“Too bad you aren’t old enough to remember Billy Martin—now there was a manager. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation”). And when Bernie Williams, formerly his favorite player, began to lose his legs and bat speed, my dad immediately expressed a strong desire for management to cut him as soon as humanly possible, if not actually ship him off to the glue factory. “Unsentimental” is how he chose to describe his attitude, while often sighing (when I protested that you couldn’t expect them to win every year, or that loyalty ought to count for something) that I was a born Mets fan, and he didn’t know where he’d gone wrong.

My mother, for her part, tolerated our baseball habit but was more or less uninterested herself. She’s eminently practical and sensible, my mom—I inherited many traits from her, but not those, unfortunately— and true sports fans only rarely display those qualities. There’s not an obvious practical or sensible reason, after all, to devote hours every day, and maybe hundreds of dollars or more a year, to demonstrate your commitment to a sports team whose success or failure will have no measurable impact on your life. No matter how much of your heart you pour into the Yankees, after all, they will not pour their hearts into you.

My mom enjoyed going to a game every season or two, and rarely complained about our monopolizing the TV for half the year. If the Yankees won in dramatic fashion, she might make quiet approving noises on our behalf, but unlike me she wouldn’t applaud, or curse an ump, or superstitiously remain in one lucky spot on the sofa to keep a rally going. Left to her own devices, she prefers to put Law & Order on in the background for aural wallpaper and settle in with the Times.

It must have been 1995 when my dad took me to my first Yankees game, because Andy Pettitte was the rookie starter. I don’t know why it took us so long to get there; for whatever reason, the Yankees had been something to watch on TV instead of a live event.

Being there in person ratcheted up my passion by several orders of magnitude. I got to see my beloved Paul O’Neill in the flesh, and was relieved that he had a solid game, so the water cooler would live to see at least one more day. The Yankees beat whoever it was they were playing (for the life of me, I can’t remember), and for the first time I got a taste of the infectious communal happiness that sweeps the Stadium after a good win—and when you’re a geeky middle school outcast, that moment of unity, of being part of the mainstream however briefly, can be exhilarating.

In the end it was the place itself, not the game, that sucked me in. The old Yankee Stadium wasn’t much to look at from the outside, at least not since its 1975 renovation: an unappealing grayish fortress, seemingly more concerned with keeping the seventies-era South Bronx at bay than with aesthetics. But I was hooked from the first moment I walked out of the concourse tunnel toward our loge seats, when the field suddenly materialized below me. The Stadium was so much bigger than I’d expected, after all those years of seeing it on our small TV, and the three-tiered crowd was buzzing; I was totally unprepared for the spectacle. It was a perfect day, too—sunny and warm, breezy, with a blue sky above the surreally green grass. Even the blocky apartment buildings and Bronx County Courthouse managed to look picturesque spread out behind the outfield.

Editorial Reviews

A warm and funny memoir (casual swearing included) by freelance writer Span, consisting of separate essay-chapters relating to her own experience of baseball, from her father's nurture over scorecards, through her time (2006–07) as sportswriter for the Voice, to observations of what the game brings out in all of us around this country and beyond—players, writers, and fans included. This will be especially enjoyed by Span's twenty-something peers who follow the Mets or Yankees. She has a refreshingly unassuming and appealing voice.

Library Journal

"Emma Span's 90% of the Game is Half Mental is one of the most enjoyable, satisfying sports books I have ever had the pleasure to read. In a modern journalistic era pocked by snark and sarcasm, Span offers up a riveting glimpse at the absurdity—and splendor—of modern sports. Were this book a mustache, it would be Don Mattingly's—circa 1988."—Jeff Pearlman author, Boys Will Be Boys and The Bad Guys Won!

"Emma Span likes bad movies ("Bats: Human Harvest"), terrible TV shows ("Walker: Texas Ranger"), and--from the perspective of this Red Sox fan—even worse baseball teams (the New York Yankees). But her zesty dispatches from the clubhouse and the bleachers signal the happy arrival of a new generation of baseball obsessives. I still can't bring myself to root for the Yankees, but it's easy to cheer for Emma Span." —Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever

"An irreverent, affectionate look at the frequently obsessive, often irrational, totally committed mindset it takes to be a true baseball fan."—Johnette Howard, author of The Rivals
 
"Emma Span understands what it means to be a sports fan. She writes about baseball the way I wish everyone would write about baseball."—Will Leitch, contributing editor, New York magazine, author God Save The Fan

From the Publisher