Damn
**Date:** 09-03-24
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Sixty-four years ago, I was a first grader riding the bus and awed by the “big kids” who laid claim to the wide bench seat in the rear. For a glorious week of October afternoons, the slow, circuitous ride home from school was punctuated by the crackling sound of their transistor radio and the rapturous play-by-play of the World Series.
The at bats of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Bobby Richardson, Yogi Berra, and other seeming gods of baseball were cheered loudly throughout the bus and all of us – including this impressionable young boy – became fanatically caught up in the action.
That a Bill Mazerowski home run walked the Pirates off to a wild win in the seventh game and sent the Yankees into the long winter with a crushing defeat did not have the slightest effect on my newfound fandom.
The Yankees would rebound to win the World Series again in ’61. A magical year in which both Mantle and Maris battled through the summer for the league lead in home runs, with the asterisk producing 61st struck by Maris on the season’s last day.
They won again the next year, and then inexplicably fell in four (!) to the Drysdale and Koufax-led Dodgers. They returned to the series in ’64, but Bob Gibson and the Cardinals won it in seven.
And then began the long drought. The Yankees had gotten old, and no good strategy had been conceived to ensure the success of another generation.
The teams that were fielded in the next dozen years were mediocre at best and embarrassing at worst. The glee of long-time Yankee-haters was barely contained, and with the ascendancy of the Mets, apathy ruled, and the stadium became a depressingly unpopulated venue.
But for some of us, that sweet memory of success became sustaining and our passion for the team and belief in every season’s potential became an unshakeable tenet of faith, as strong as any conviction in our young lives.
The Yankees didn’t make it back to the World Series until ’76, where they were steamrolled by the Big Red Machine, and didn’t win again until 1977. However, as I reflect on my life, I consider those years to have been instructive and the lessons taught invaluable to the formation of my character and my optimistic nature.
I believe that one of the great lessons of life is failure – knowing how to lose gracefully, and with an ability to appreciate the qualities of the victor. Rather than seeking someone to blame, examining instead the success of the winner, and learning from it.
“Wait ‘til next year” becomes a less empty phrase when you see evidence of your team taking its instruction from the exposure of its deficiencies.
While no one has put me in charge of the Yankees – (if only) – I have been elected to provide leadership and vision for this city as Oneonta seeks to lay claim to its own championship seasons.
We’ve been winners before.
By clear-eyed assessment of our weaknesses, and an understanding of how and why we have been successful in the past, we’re formulating a strategy for the near and long-term future.
To win, we need a deep bench. That means we must commit to growing our workforce, and with it our economy. We must embrace, train, and empower our next generation of entrepreneurs and civic leaders.
Continuing our baseball analogy, it’s about having a healthy farm system. Who knows who’ll be Oneonta’s next Murcer, Mattingly, Jeter, or Judge?
I’m eternally optimistic and I remain a diehard fan… of the Yankees and of my beloved city.
