Keefe To The City

This is the first of a recurring series of recollections, where I will be marching though my old scorecards from my halcyon days in good old Section 39 of the Yankee Stadium bleachers. Let’s pick this up in 1996. You’re invited to join me. Please bring beer.

April 12, 1996: Yankees host the Texas Rangers. (My first game in ’96 and on a Friday night to boot!)

This year was huge. Obviously closing with a World Series win, but along the way we saw a no-hitter, the debut of some of your favorite Bleacher Creatures of lore, the passing of our beloved friend Ali the Cowbell King, vicious fights in the stands and all kinds of hubbub. To top it all off, in regards to scorecard fodder, my love affair with the beer bottle was seemingly at its zenith this year. Leafing through some of the cards without peeking too deeply at the jokes, I see a lot of scraggly, drunken scrawl and a lot of cards look beyond repair. But let’s get past that and kick this mother off!

I had big plans for ’96. On the top margin of this evening’s scorecard I confidently wrote “my first of 50+” however, as I type this, I’m not sure of my exact number of scorecards when it was all said and done, but I know I sailed through 50-plus games, and that was sans playoffs. On the other hand, I was far from midseason form coming in. I lost my voice early on during this evening game, actually before 8 p.m.! It was a frosty April night causing at least half-a-dozen people to walk up the stairs and crack the same joke, “Is it spring yet?” Heck of a time to recall this too, in the midst of a spate of heat waves here in New York, but in marking down the crisp nature of the evening air, I can understand the cynicism as to the missing spring.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Before the game there was a madcap slap-fight outside on the bleacher line when some drunkard decided to take a tinkle right there on the sidewalk and peed on another guy’s leg. The guy getting sprayed slapped him in the face like they were wearing pigtails in a playground and the peeing guy stopped what he was doing long enough to slap him back. They exchanged a flurry of slaps, much to the amusement of everyone on hand that managed to stay dry through the whole encounter. “Throw a punch, for Christ’s sake!” someone hollered. I turned to a crony as things were broken up and said, “That’s going down on the scorecard.”

Let me address the idea of the “bleacher line” as it may confuse some used to the bleachers of today. Back then we had a “GA” situation going on. (General admission seats! You could sit wherever you want!) The gates opened at a certain time and until then you snaked along the sidewalk, patiently. Well, except the guy who was too impatient to hold in his pee. Most of us did not yet have a ticket, so we queued up to grab one once the grumpy guys opened the windows. It was long a favorite tact of bleacher legend Gang Bang Steve (that’s him pregaming to the left of me in the picture above) to get to the window and ask fervently, “Can I have a seat right behind Bernie?  It’s my first time in town and I’m a longtime fan!” The ticket guy would snarl, “It’s general admission, sit wherever you want,” and Steve would throw his arms up in the air in mock exasperation, blustering, “You don’t understand! He’s my favorite player ever! I just want a seat right behind him. It would mean a lot.” It was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. This would play out all the time, and Steve used to walk the line here and there asking others to pitch in and ask the guy for a seat “behind Bernie.” (No wonder the ticket guys were so grumpy.)

It was a surreal scene outside on this night, which was par for the course. There was even a licensed pretzel vendor proudly wearing a Red Sox cap. I remember a few brazen Yankee fans not only cursing at him, but also taunting him that they were going to get him fired. All the while these same guys were buying pretzels from him.

Ah, I see we touched upon current events, a consistent scorecard theme over the years. Anyone remember the seven-year-old girl that crashed the plane? At the time she had been attempting to be the youngest person to pilot a plan across the United States, and I was one of many who had been howling about how ridiculously dumb this idea was. I was soliciting jokes for the scorecard, pretty much asking, “Anyone have any jokes about the seven-year old that crashed the plane?” Thankfully, there were none.

Random crack written down on here from Tina (the revered “Queen of the Bleachers” to this very day and beyond) that simply says, “Sit down already! We know you’re Puerto Rican!” to some mope that kept standing up at any and all times, and I would assume holding a flag aloft to claim this lineage. Someone else promptly dubbed the offending stander-upper “El Sucko.” This “standing up for no reason” was inherited by a Panamanian long-timer, who still haunts the seats to this day, named Junior. He would stand up if someone pointed out a pretty cloud. Junior is also known to go on beer runs for the crew and return with the one beer we told him not to get, or crashing on the floor of my old Long Island City apartment back in the day, only to wake me up at 7 a.m. the following morning because he would be watching Matlock with the volume up too high.

In regards to special guests for this game that made the scorecard, there was a George Foreman look-alike, and a gigantic gawky woman we promptly dubbed Big Bird. There was a Jim Leyritz look-alike, too.

The legendary cowbell mix master Ali Ramirez showed up late enough to where it became a topic of discussion. Ali was the kind of guy whose absence could not go unnoticed, and sadly we lost him a month later. On this night he rang up the first cowbell at 7:25 for the 7:30 game, and even “shook his ass” for the crowd while he did it. For a while (until the number of jokes scrawled on the card became beyond too voluminous for mundane minutia) I used to keep such archaic notations as actual times of cowbell serenades, vaunted entrances of the notoriously late and random bursts of the litany of songs that added to the festive atmosphere back then. So if you wanted to know how many times Ali clacked his bell, and more importantly at exactly what time on a certain date, I inexplicably had this information.

Apparently there were a lot of “Chinese guys” out there as well causing me to muse how cool it would be if we could get a Chinese guy to sing the “Gang Bang” sometime. For the uninitiated, the “Gang Bang” was an early staple that had a run of quite a few years, surprisingly so given the general surliness of the security staff through the years. Here’s a video of Dr. Dirty John Valby for you to get the picture. Now take that picture and imagine that song being belted out nightly by dozens of rowdies in the bleacher seats. Better yet, here’s vintage footage of this very grandiose presentation with our own Gang Bang Steve leading a very raucous crowd through the bouncing ditty in Section 39 in 1996. (You can even spot yours truly, expertly multitasking as I can be seen scribbling away on my scorecard while lustily partaking in verse.)

In oddball bleacher trivia, this is how Gang Bang Steve came upon his moniker, as he was a noted ringleader for this caustic tune, although the air of mystery as to how he got his name always added to the frivolity when he would be introduced to people over the years. Eyebrows would raise when anyone was offered a handshake to someone introduced as “Gang Bang Steve” and many times I’d hear, “He sure doesn’t look like a swinger.” (The reaction upon introduction was a hit at my wedding.) Speaking of the “Gang Bang” song and the aforementioned Steve, I commented proudly on the card that Gang Bang Steve was back at my side, helping keep score and providing some of these very jokes. So blame him if you’re not entertained! One of the first things he did upon settling in for the night was draw the “Joey Cora infield” on the scorecard, including a first base line that takes a hard right and loop back towards first, in a nod to Cora’s getting away with running out of the baseline during that sickly playoff the year before.

Time for a story. For years Steve was entered into my cell phone simply as “Gang Bang.” This passed by without incident to a time where I was training at what was then my new job, sitting pretty much shoulder-to-shoulder with my new boss, who was teaching me some things on the computer. Well, my phone, just to right of the computer on the desk, started blinking that a call was coming in. It was on mute, so I was just going to let it go until I saw the words “Gang Bang” flashing on and off the screen. My boss never asked and I never told, but I know she saw it as it was directly in front of her, and human nature would surely make one wonder why someone’s phone would flash such a tawdry remark. She must have thought it was an appointment reminder. Add to this that only days before I had shown up for my first day at this new job with a black eye and my boss must have really been wondering what the hell was going on with me, and how I passed the background check.

Ah, back to the night’s affairs. One guy came up bedecked in a stunning array of bling, and I remarked that he “Looks like a real G.” This guy Chris promptly responded, “No, he looks like a real A.” He then added, “As in a–hole” though that was superfluous.

DING, DING! Looks like Gang Bang Steve got the first home-run ball of the year that was tagged out to the bleachers, and it came off the bat of none other than Ruben Sierra. I don’t know if it was on the fly or a series of bounces off empty seats as I was too busy marking times that Ali clanked on his bell to recount this admittedly more interesting factoid, but Steve got it and it’s mentioned multiple times on the card. I need to ask Steve if he still has that ball, though I’m sure he amassed quite a collection over the years from our drunken forays into the Stadium for BP. Ironically enough, just before Ruben’s jack, someone said (and I quote), “I want to see Ruben go yard!” and we laughed at the phrase “go yard.”

Not much more on here, which I suppose I shall attribute to the cold temps making writing not fun. We busted on a fellow fan ID’d as “Lee” for his “Little Rascals haircut.” We ripped into some Coneheads, the wacky crew with dunce caps on their head, who were back for more with David Cone on the mound. “School’s over, put the dunce cap away!” A “Dickheads! Dickheads!” chant sparked up as the Coneheads sat there with sad expressions at this vitriol. They wore out their welcome fast. I remember them being met with mostly apathy and tolerance in 1995, but by ‘96 their fellow fans had had enough of them, and Tina especially was on the warpath when it came to them. I guess our sort of exclusive pack were the only ones out there allowed to have nice stuff. The same thing befell the folks who would show up in “Moose” antlers when Mike Mussina would take the mound. They were not exactly “fan favorites.” To cap off the card I also mentioned we actually got to hear some Loverboy (one of my favorite old-school bands, bless them) over the Stadium PA. I suspect I was doing some air guitar, too, and hopefully others joined in.

Some interesting names from the past on here include our elderly and mysterious friend “Godfather” (who used to skulk around in the old days putting the “voodoo” on Yankee foes) and on this night he muttered, “He’s doing bad, take him out,” as John Wetteland was imploding in the ninth. We let Angel, the ex-girlfriend of the previously mentioned George (Big Nose/Little Drummer Boy), keep score for an inning somewhere on here. She was well known for once gazing at Cal Ripken Jr. out at short with a long-sleeved black sweatshirt on under his jersey and saying in a confused manner, “I didn’t realize Cal Ripken Jr. was black?” Tina, who was considered more of a strict boss back then than the honored elder she is these days (much more on her to come), had one of her patented temper tantrums at 9:25, but sadly the reason for this particular outburst is lost to history.

For the record, the first “MO” of the season (Mystery Out, of course) was hung on Joe Girardi, during his at-bat in the sixth. (I can and will do a separate column on the wonders, and the astounding frequency, of the infamous “Mystery Out.”) The “Mystery Out” was another longtime friend in the bleachers that never left and one we would visit time and time again. I’m happy that Phil Rizzuto shared this same propensity on his own scorecards, although he earmarked his missed plays as “WW” for “Wasn’t Watching.”

Always like to see this: I noted that Yankees history was made on this same day, as the team signed Juan Rivera to a contract as a non-drafted free agent.

As for the game action, the Yankees took this one 4-3 behind a strong performance by David Cone (one run, unearned, in seven innings) and solid setup work by new Yankee and former foe Jeff Nelson, who recently enjoyed a visit to the bleachers, where he sat for nearly eight innings with the modern crop of Creatures. I like to think he would have had more fun back in ‘96 when we were allowed to carry on without the shackles of security, but cheers to him for the gesture and nod to the merry. Wetteland almost coughed it up in the ninth – a recurring prospect – getting tagged for a deuce, but escaped with his first save of the season, albeit amidst some grumbling from the crowd. That relic Ken Hill took the loss for the Rangers, and we got to see none other than the likes of Dennis Cook and Matt Whiteside also toe the rubber for Texas.

The Yankees only mustered six hits on the night with two off the bat of Sierra, who homered and plated two runs. Your Yankees lineup was:

1. Wade Boggs, 3B
2. Mariano Duncan, SS
3. Paul O’Neill, RF
4. Ruben Sierra, DH
5. Tino Martinez, 1B (Welcome!)
6. Bernie Williams, CF
7. Dion James, LF (He was still here?)
8. Joe Girardi, C
9. Derek Jeter, SS

The Rangers countered with:

1. Darryl Hamilton, CF
2. Pudge Rodriguez, C
3. Will Clark, 1B (Just this week he was being touted for the freakin’ Hall of Fame by some delusional fan online)
4. Juan Gonzalez, RF
5. Mickey Tettleton, DH (We deemed him a racist for putting up a “KKK” line on the scorecard with three whiffs)
6. Dean Palmer, 3B
7. Rusty Greer, LF
8. Mark McLemore, 2B
9. Kevin Elster, SS (LOL)

The Rangers only managed five hits with Palmer nabbing two of them, including a mighty clack off of Wetteland to scare us in the ninth.

How about a quick profile? I always enjoyed doing these to add to the shine of those old days. (Fear not, I’ll keep it brief.) Rusty Greer it is!

Greer was quite the gamer, and he’s looked upon fondly. He stuck around Texas from 1994-2002, getting out of there with a .305 lifetime batting average. In 1,027 games (3,829 at-bats) he knocked 119 taters and drove in 614. His aggressive play could never be credited for art of speed, as he managed only 31 stolen bases in his nine years, while being nailed 15 times. He walked almost as many times as he struck out (555 strikeouts, 519 walks), which is an admirable feat in itself, but he was a better player than I gave him credit for. Well, come to think of it, his estimated salary data has him pulling in nearly $40 million over his career, so he made his bones. In ‘96 and ‘97 he batted .332 and .321 respectively, so we saw him here in a flourish. Born in 1969, he was originally a 10^th-round pick in the 1990 draft and the only player ever drafted out of the University of Montevallo in Alabama in his native state. As of July 17, 2012, his monumental page on Baseball-Reference has been viewed 30,582 times, which sounds shamefully low to me. His passion for the game and his firebrand style of play is sorely missed!

Only 20,238 were on hand for my first Friday night game of the year in the cold, and the game took 2:51 to play, so at least we got out of there in reasonable fashion, (most likely to drink the night away). Thank you, Red Sox, for not being in town, and getting us out of there before 11:30. Your umpires on hand were none other than Dale Scott, Rocky Roe, the late and lamented Durwood Merrill and Gary Cederstrom.

Welcome to 1996. Please enjoy your stay.