Nine Innings At Ground Zero

"Nobody get on a plane
unless your last name is Bin Laden!"

I saw the movie when it first came out.  First, right
off the bat, I am almost never impressed when the
movie industry tries to make baseball a metaphor for
larger issues.  In this case, the filmmakers were
treading in well-worn footsteps -- 9/11 being the most
overly and artlessly metaphorized event in our
lifetimes.  Bad 9/11 poetry is like a cottage industry
in interoffice e-mail forwards.  And baseball has been
used for some of the sappiest attempts at storytelling
in history.  So the marriage between the two was not
likely to disappoint.

Not that there aren't parallels to be drawn; they're
just missed here for the easier and more PC narrative.

Some of the scenes were moving, but I thought in
general that it was awful, overly sappy and tedious.
I was more than a little annoyed that they dug up
the "Yankees represent America" metaphor.
I thought I could safely put that cringe-worthy
analysis into the ground when Luis Gonzalez's single
fell into center field.  If you go by that, then since
the Yankees lost, does that mean America is a bunch of
losers?  Or that Phoenix is a haven for terrorists?
It isn't anti-Yankee bias, either -- it just doesn't
make much sense, whether it was the Yankees, the Mets
or the New Rochelle Little League team we're talking
about.  It's just baseball.  A happy diversion from
the crap going on in the real world.

Isn't Phoenix part of America?  If I were a
Diamondbacks fan, or even just an Arizonan or non-New
Yorker in general, I would be a little insulted at the
implication that the Yankees were America's team or
whatever bullshit that was being reported at the time.
To read the papers, you would have thought the
Yankees were playing against al-Qaeda.

Anyway, what it boils down to as a larger issue, and
what that movie gets wrong, is that, insofar as a
baseball team can represent anything, the Yankees
don't represent the best of New York.  New Yorkers are
tough and classy, simultaneously down-to-earth and
intellectual.  Many New Yorkers I know rejected Bush's
little photo-op, politicking on top of the mass grave
at Ground Zero with a bullhorn four days too late as a
publicity stunt; it's true, many were fooled, and we're
just now coming out of the post-9/11 hypnosis as a country,
four and a half years later.  But this
movie sews gut-level imagery like that into a
patchwork of unquestioning pseudo-patriotism which has
worn thin.  The Yankees' constant
image-churning, money-wasting approach to baseball
smacks of a microcosm of all the things that are
currently wrong with the country at large, the things
to which New York is something of an outpost of
rebellion.

The Yankees are the antithesis of New York's values.
The Yankees' organization plays to none of the great
qualities of New Yorkers; they rely on conformity and
knee-jerk visceral imagery, the baseball equivalent of
the Bush photo ops, to carve out their niche in the
market.  And with 350 million dollars at their
disposal, they do a good job of it.  The Mets did way
more to help immediately after 9/11 than the Yankees
did; in fact certain Yankees even publicly criticized
the Mets for doing visible charity work, calling it a "PR ploy".
Then the Yankees tried to co-opt the good will by grafting God
Bless America and weepy military tributes onto their
games for the past 4 years.  The Yankees are image;
the Mets are emotion and substance.

At least half the New Yorkers I know either root for
the Mets, root for other teams that don't play in New
York (lots of Boston fans live here), or just don't
care about baseball and are sick of hearing about the
Yankees already.  For that reason, this huge group of
New Yorkers, myself included, saw the Diamondbacks'
championship as a welcome relief to the horror of the
past couple of months.

I don't know if that movie would sell, but I'd buy it.