Free Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould

redemption?
    Just consider the possible scenarios. Yes, the first subway series since 1956 if the Yanks win and, however improbably, the Mets manage to vanquish the Braves. But suppose that the Sox win and the Mets also triumph. Then, in the last chance of the millennium, Boston gets an utterly unexpected opportunity to undo a century of humiliation from New York. This second round against the Yanks would redeem 1949 and 1978. A subsequent World Series victory over the Mets would then cancel the greatest pain of 1986 and restore the earth’s moral balance just before our great calendrical transition.
    Boston could then exorcise the curse of the Bambino—the well-known hex put on the Sox when Boston owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yanks in 1920 to raise enough cash to take a flutter on a Broadway show. (Boston last won the World Series in 1918.) The dreaded date of 1986 could be uttered again in Boston, and Bill Buckner, a fine player and gentleman who deserves a far better fate, can live the rest of his life in peace.
    And Boston would stage its biggest and most memorable party since a group of hotheaded patriots dumped some tea into the harbor, an act that has reverberated for more than two hundred years—with the invention and spread of baseball, rather than cricket, as a primary ramification. These are indeed, as Thomas Paine said in an early reverberation, the times that try men’s souls.

Freud at the Ballpark
    A highly inconvenient law of physics states that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Consequently, as New York rejoices in the first “subway series” since my high school days of 1956, we also lament that two of the three sacred places of past contests—Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and the Giants’ Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan—now exist only as memories beneath housing projects, and not as material realities.
     
    First published in the New York Times , October 19, 2000. Reprinted with permission of the New York Times.
     
    But I suggest a look on the bright side, spurred by a metaphor that Freud devised to begin his book with a quintessential New York title: Civilization and Its Discontents . Freud acknowledged the physical reality cited above, but he celebrated, in happy contrast, the mind’s power to overlay current impressions directly upon past memories. The mind, he argued, might be compared with a mythical Rome that could raise a modern civic building upon a medieval cathedral built over a classical temple, while preserving all three structures intact in the same spot: “Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House…. The same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built.” The physical fable fails, but we can, as Freud notes, make such an “impossible” superposition in our mental representations, for our memories survive, long after fate has imposed a sentence of death or the wrecking ball upon their sources: “Only in the mind,” Freud adds, “is such a preservation of all the earlier stages alongside of the final form possible.”
    Thus, I can watch Roger Clemens striking out fifteen Mariners in a brilliant one-hitter and place his frame right on top of Don Larsen pitching his perfect game in 1956. And I can admire the grace of Bernie Williams in center field, while my teenage memories see Mantle’s intensity, and my first impressions of childhood recall DiMaggio’s elegance, in exactly the same spot. I can then place all three images upon the foundation of my father’s stories of DiMaggio as a rookie in the 1936 Series, and my grandfather Papa Joe’s tales of Babe Ruth in the first three New York series of 1921–1923.
    The count of the last millennium stopped at unlucky thirteen in 1956. The reality of a subway series grew from more modest roots and routes. The first two New York series of 1921 and 1922 never left the Polo