Dan-nie Baseball

Yesterday an imperfect man threw a perfect game.

When the New York Yankees' Don Larsen tossed the only post-season no-hitter in professional baseball history better than forty years ago, New York Times writer Joe Tremble led with that line, encapsulating the vindication of Larsen's career-long woes by his chilling performance against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series.

Yesterday, a modern-day incarnation of Larsen's feat shook the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium to its crumbling foundations.

David Wells, the paunchy, disheveled, 35 year-old journeyman retired 27 Minnesota Twins in order, for three hours captivating a crowd of 50,000 New Yorkers on a grey, gloomy Sunday afternoon in the Bronx.

This was the same David Wells who made waves by breaking his pitching hand shortly after joining the Yankees in the 1996 offseason--in a fistfight at his mother's funeral.

The same David Wells who, sweating bullets in the late-summer heat, dropped five straight starts in August and September of 1997, ensuring the Bombers' descent into the wild card. The same Wells who inherited a 9-0 lead in the bottom of the third inning just two starts ago against Texas, then exited in shame and anger when he served up seven runs before recording an out.

Our own Michael Sandel writes, in this week's issue of The New Republic, "Sports stadiums are the cathedrals of our civil religion, public spaces that gather people from different walks of life in rituals of loss and hope, profanity and prayer." Remembering the last no-hitter at the 161st street ballyard evoked those images of spirituality and hope.

Two years ago last Thursday, Dwight Gooden burst back on the baseball scene by no-hitting the hated Seattle Mariners, and for nine innings the typically heterogeneous group of New Yorkers seated around me in the rightfield bleachers were immersed in something that, following Sandel, must properly be termed a religious experience.

From Fat Daddy Chico, the bookie who, with his entourage occupies the first row of seats, to the "suits"--the Wall Streeters who rode the 4 train uptown to take in a game--to the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who somehow always manage to comprise a significant chunk of the bleacher attendance, a mass of humanity totally blind to distinctions of class, race and creed bound together around a man who had been chased from the pastime in disgrace for cocaine addiction.

Gooden's morality play looked something like Wells'. A beleaguered starter who--despite his 16 wins in a Yankee uniform last season and his gritty, complete-game playoff win against Cleveland--had never fully captured the convictions of a baseball public notoriously hard to please, Wells pitched like he had a chip on his shoulder.

He fanned 11, he painted the corners and he only needed one defensive ace--Chuck Knoblauch's eighth-inning knockdown of a line drive--to unite 50,000 of the most ornery, unforgiving fans in baseball behind his cause.

No, he had no addiction to battle (unless one considers his penchant for six-packs and Big Macs), but he had everything to prove. Wells has become the butt of hardball jokes, wearing his Yankee uniform like a pair of pajamas and angrily flipping balls to manager Joe Torre when he's yanked from games.

But in a paradoxical way, yesterday's classic marked the flip side of Wells's personality--the Everyman. This balding, overweight, middle-aged man, who has more than his fair share of doppelgangers in the Yankee Stadium stands, lived out every fan's fantasy, a collective dream of transcendent excellence.

Baseball, as Sandel intimates, often serves as a sacred space, whether in the bleachers or in the Bronx bars that no doubt drank a round in Boomer's honor after Paul O'Neill gloved Pat Meares's pop-up.

Even here in Beantown, in an Adams house common room straining to hear John Sterling and Michael Kay's call over an Internet feed, temporarily abandoning Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman for the exploits of another New York school, Well's quest for baseball legend shone through.

Crack all the jokes you want, and the man smoking a Monte Cristo in the clubhouse yesterday afternoon won't care. For one day at least, this Everyman was perfect.