#154. Yankee Stadium (Friday, July 2, 2010)
What was your best day…of being somewhere, even if you didn’t belong there?
The irony of this family trip to New York City was that it came at the exact point in my life when everything I associated with New York—high finance, glamorous social circles, the pinnacle of career success—felt farther away than ever.
The previous two years hadn’t been great, and the three months since returning from my second year at Waterloo had been a disaster: no summer job, and little inclination to find one. The idea of interning at any of the hundreds of banks and corporations I passed on those streets—even as a finance major—felt delusional. My demotivation, nonexistent job-search skills, and spotty academic record hadn’t even been enough to land me a small temporary job back home.
Then, on the Wednesday before the trip, finally: some success. It was only passing my G2 driver’s test (#55). But that little success carried into the five days that followed, in exactly the city where a bit of optimism could go a long way.
We made the seven-hour drive from Ottawa—or rather, my parents did, despite me now being legally allowed to drive on the highway with supervision—and spent the first two nights in Secaucus, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan, before spending one night each with old friends of my parents in Brooklyn and suburban Philadelphia. We visited the Financial District, including the New York Stock Exchange and Federal Reserve,1 saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, did the full Times Square thing, and I made a reasonably successful effort to act like an adult around my parents’ friends. It was also around the peak of my brother and me exchanging inane, repetitive jokes every minute we were on the road together—before he grew out of it and left me as the one who was still saying random things (#72).
But that first full day in Manhattan was special. It starts first thing in the morning, as we’re taking the elevator down in our Secaucus hotel, and see a family dressed in Yankees gear. My dad asks, and they say they’re going to the game today. We check, and it turns out that today—out of all days—it’s against the Toronto Blue Jays.
It isn’t a committed plan yet, and I’m oddly taken aback by the boldness of it. Go see my favorite sports team—at what was close to a historical peak in my fandom—play their hated rivals and the defending World Series champions, in their brand-new but already aura-filled stadium? It wasn’t so much “too good to be true” as an inner: did I even deserve to be this close to something that prestigious? But over the course of the day, as we bus into the city and walk around Midtown2, the idea gathers force.
We stop by the Yankees store, but the only official seats left are Audi club tickets with a full buffet for $150 each (not a bad deal these days), so we figure we’ll just pick up tickets from a scalper there. And luckily, shortly after we get off the 2 Train with a large mass of Yankees fans, we find a guy hawking tickets for a very reasonable price and buy three from him. My dad, my brother, and I head in, me still in a state of total shock. Our seats are in the literal last row of the stadium. Behind us is only a thin-feeling metal barrier, then open air and the Bronx below.
It’s a wild game. Obviously, the Yankees are heavy favorites, and they score an early run. Then, in a critical moment, they have the bases loaded with nobody out in the bottom of the third, and the Jays escape without giving up a run (starting with a strikeout of Alex Rodriguez himself). The score stays that way until the eighth, when the Jays tie it off Joba Chamberlain.3 Then heading into the ninth with the score still tied, it’s time for Enter Sandman. Mariano Rivera enters to his iconic Metallica music, and the stadium goes nuts. That was the one moment in the whole game when I stopped feeling like I was merely watching something epic and started feeling like I was living inside it. It goes to extra innings and the Jays score five runs in the top of the eleventh to win it. (And they’re still technically in the playoff race at this early point in the season, so it’s a pretty big deal.) I was physically there to see my lowly Jays take down—in comeback fashion—the most powerful team in baseball. I can’t even believe the words as I say them.
Something I never fully appreciated until much later is that this was the only time I ever saw A-Rod, Jeter, and Rivera play in person. The only time. But even that mythic fact was overtaken in my memory by something else. For one day, despite all the academic and career failures and collapsed self-confidence, I could be part of something objectively, undeniably triumphant in a city that otherwise felt far, far beyond my reach.
- Even then, with no conception of a future career in policy finance—or much conception of a future career at all—there was something about the New York Fed building that stuck with me as meaning a little more (#24, #12).
- In the greatest irony never to be repeated, going to the Chinese restaurant was my idea. My mom wanted fast food, but I figured we should at least eat at a restaurant while we were in New York. The food was actually pretty good, despite my general dislike of Chinese food. More memorably, there was a three-egg-roll special for the four of us. When a waiter noticed everyone except my brother eating one, he brought him a fourth and said in Chinese, “We can’t leave you out, of course.” Such a small, innocent gesture in the middle of New York stuck with me for the rest of the trip.
- A few particularly irate Yankees fans in my section kept yelling, “Joba! Do your job!” Though from where we were sitting, he probably couldn’t hear them.