A-Rod--the new Reggie?

One of the lasting memories of growing up was the "NBC Game of the Week," this at a time when our baseball viewing was restricted to two games per week: "Game of the Week" on Saturday, then "Monday Night Baseball" with (good gracious) Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell on, of course, Mondays.

I prefer what we have today, with MLB.com and 100 chances, minimum, to see your favorite team on the air. But I don't doubt that something has been lost. Every "Game of the Week" featuring the Yankees was an event at our house; every Yankees-Red Sox game was something verging on a family crisis, around which my father would plan that given Saturday. Lunch (hot dogs and potato chips) was served on TV trays arranged in a semi-circle around our family's RCA black-and-white. And so it came to pass that, one afternoon, we (and several million others) saw maybe the greatest dugout meltdown in history unfold before us.

It was embarrassing watching the Yankees, in the late seventies, play the Red Sox at Fenway in June and July, when Boston was at its warmest and the wind blew out to left. The Red Sox then were a team built for power: Yaz, Pudge, Rice, Lynn, Butcher, Dewey--a group of players who played racquetball off the Monster when they weren't hitting homers to deep center. It was during one of the routine thumpings that right-fielder Reggie Jackson, in the opinion of manager Billy Martin, loafed on a hit to right by Jim Rice that Rice (not the most hustling of ballers) played into a double. Martin, in response, sent in Paul Blair to replace Jackson in the middle of the inning--the only such derricking I have ever seen, or even heard of, in thirty years of watching baseball.

What happened next would go down in history. An alert NBC cameraman caught Jackson walk into the dugout and confront Martin. Martin, who was a brilliant judge of baseball talent and an even more brilliant game strategist--but was better known for his fistfights and drunken revelries--seemed almost to welcome Jackson's anger. By all accounts, Jackson called Martin an "old man," which was enough for Martin to initiate hostilities. No punches were thrown, due to coaches Elston Howard and Yogi Berra's physically restraining Martin three different times, finally dragging Martin nearly the length of the dugout and depositing him in his seat, where Martin stayed for the remainder of the game, like a child enduring a time-out.

It is hard in print to capture just how stunned my family was, watching this drama unfold. For reality television, for the I-can't-freaking-believe-this quotient, perhaps only OJ Simpson's slow-speed chase exceeded the sight of a manager attempting to beat the crap out of a right-fielder twenty years younger and thirty pound heavier.

From that day forward, if it hadn't already happened, Reggie would always be an interloper to many Yankee fans. He would be an outsider, a hired gun to be tolerated but never loved. Billy Martin (who would have been the World Series MVP in '52 and '53, had such a thing existed then) was the connection to the old Yankees, to Mickey and Whitey and even Yogi, the man who'd had to restrain Martin from the worst impulses of himself. Martin, warts and all, was a Real Yankee, as were the Yankees who'd been around the previous year to return the Yankees to the World Series: Sparky, Thurman, Nettles, Randolph, Mickey. It was well-known, as Mike Lupica recounts today in "Shooting from the Lip," that Jackson was disliked by about half the team, led by a clique of Sparky Lyle, Graig Nettles and Thurman Munson. Even after the most stupendous batting performance in history--four home runs in four consecutive swings over the last two games of the World Series, to complete that same season--the resentment toward Jackson was never far from the surface. The following year, when Martin's erratic behavior forced him from the job, Jackson, Billy's main antagonist, found himself booed at home.

Lupica's column drew the comparison between A-Rod's struggles and Reggie's: the boos that subside only for a game-winning home run, the dislike that is nearly stylistic. As I write this, the Yankees are getting creamed, 13-5, by the Blue Jays; A-Rod has gone 0 for 4 and stranded 4 teammates.

The game just went final.

I just was remembering Reggie, as I read about A-Rod. And what I had to say was: Please. To compare A-Rod, or these Yankees, to Reggie and the Bronx Zoo is not even a conversational starter. The Bronx Zoo is never coming back, in large part because Joe Torre would never allow it. We are left not with a fistfight, but with A-Rod's o-fer and a long flight home.