Living in New York is fantastic. If you live here, I don’t need to tell you this. There’s a reason so many people flood into this city from all over the world. There’s a reason so many people can’t imagine living anyplace else.
However, for the non-native New Yorker who is also a parent, there are downsides. There’s all the free babysitting we’ve missed out on. If we lived near our families, we’d be able to drop the kid off and go to a movie on a whim. A whim, people! If we lived somewhere else, there’s a pretty good chance we’d have a house by now, instead of a one-bedroom apartment. (I’m not complaining! It’s affordable! It’s large for Manhattan!)
There’s one particularly depressing downside to Big Apple living for a transplanted Northern Ohioan like myself: how the hell am I supposed to keep my son from becoming a Yankees fan when we live twenty-six blocks from Yankee Stadium–and Progressive Field (home of the Cleveland Indians) is four hundred and sixty-four miles away?
I’m not a rabid baseball fan. My love for the game is decidedly non-feverish. I’m not a stat-head. I never had season tickets when I lived in the area. I couldn’t name everyone in the Indians’ starting line-up this year. But I do follow the team’s progress online. I watch the occasional nationally televised game (or I did, before we ditched cable). I even sit down and watch ESPN.com’s Gamecast every once in awhile.
My love for the Indians is born from growing up in rural Ohio. From listening to Joe Tate call the game as I drove around with my dad. From occasional pilgrimages to Municipal Stadium to sit in crappy seats and cheer on a losing team. From decade upon decade of heartbreak and disappointment.
It’s not that my son will grow up without the geographical connection that I had to my beloved tribe. It’s not that he won’t be able to see or hear their games because you have to go out of your way to watch/listen to a Cleveland game around here. It’s the fact that he’s got a team two subway stops away that wins all the time. Everyone likes a winner. It’s easy. They win, you like them for it, done. What possible reason will my son have, aside from possibly throwing a bone to his poor old man, to become a Cleveland fan?
And do I want that for him? Do I want him to know the misery of getting your hopes up through the spring, only to watch the team flush any potential they had of making the playoffs by the All-Star break? Do I want my kid to beat his head against the wall year after year after year and waste his time cheering for a team that will always, always disappoint him?
Well, if I did, it’d be a lot easier to make him a Mets fan.
Joe Wack currently teaches science to elementary school children in the Bronx. He lives in Harlem with his wife and 3-year-old son.
