Talkin' New Yawk

By Robert Sullivan/West 52nd St.

Nick, who tends bar at Gallagher's, a New York City joint where ghosts linger like cigar smoke, has been pouring booze in this town for a good long while. "Let's say I'm 75," he lies. "I was born at 29th Street and First Avenue, and my first job in a bar was at the Queens Terrace. I would say I worked 30 bars. I worked up and down Second Avenue. I was the first bartender in the London Room at Idlewild [now Kennedy] Airport. I worked the Gaslight Club at 56th and Lex." Nick has ministered to Rocky Graziano, Jack Dempsey, Sinatra, many gangsters, many ballplayers. "I saw Mantle out a lot," he says of the late Yankees legend and nighthound. "Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin--Billy got in a fight with an off-duty umpire when he was loaded, and I had to act as referee. I saw Joe DiMaggio."

Such are Nick's bona fides as a pulse taker of New York City, where the proud but aging New York Yankees will face a bent-for-glory New York Mets team for the city's, not to mention baseball's, championship. So tell us, Nick, what's this Subway Series all about? What has it done to the Apple's heart?

"Oh, my God, forget it!" Nick says. "It's all the conversation! Anybody who's not into it is just shut out of it! Our bar--everybody's a Yankees fan. In Flushing, where I live--all Mets. Both places, it's tense! There's gonna be fisticuffs before this tug-of-war's through. It's just like it was in..."

The year eludes Nick, but it doesn't escape Robert W. Creamer, who's had a few lunches at Gallagher's since 1956, when he covered the last Subway Series for a struggling young rag called SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. "I did that one and '55," says Creamer, biographer of both Babe and Casey (Ruth and Stengel, for the baseball illiterati). "Back then a Subway Series was of a piece--there were 13 of them in New York between 1921 and '56. The Yankees were playing the Giants, or then later they were playing the Dodgers. It was a rivalry renewed, and players developed histories within the Subway Series. DiMaggio played in six of them. Ruth, Mantle, Whitey Ford, Pee Wee Reese of the Dodgers, Jackie Robinson." The Subway Series even has a patron saint. Stengel was on the Giants' roster in the very first New York-New York Series, when both the Yanks and Giants played in the Polo Grounds in 1921. The Giants won that Series and the next year's too. In the first game of the 1923 Series, Stengel hit the first World Series home run ever in Yankee Stadium, an inside-the-park job that broke a 4-4 tie in the ninth. He lost his shoe while running; Damon Runyon made fun of him in the papers. Two days later, Casey hit another homer and thumbed his nose at the Yankees while rounding third. Ruth hit three that year, though, as the Yanks won their first of 25 championships.

By 1949, Stengel had switched to managing and changed into pinstripes. He won his first of five Subway Series as a skipper that year, when his Yankees beat the Dodgers four games to one, and his last in '56, when the Bombers beat the Bums 4-3. The Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles in 1958, but in 1962 Queens got the Mets. And who was the first manager of the Amazin's? Stengel, tying things up nicely.

Roger Kahn was on the beat too back in the '50s, when Gallagher's and Toots Shor's were auxiliary press boxes for regular Yankees-Dodgers set-tos. "The Series before '55 had an edge to them because the Dodgers were integrated, with Jackie Robinson, while the Yankees were all white," says Kahn, whose classic The Boys of Summer chronicled those Dodgers. "There was a TV show called Youth Wants to Know, and in the winter of '52-'53 a youngster asked Jackie Robinson if the Yankees were prejudiced. Said Robinson: 'Since you asked me, I will answer--I think the Yankees are prejudiced.' So those Series had an edge to them.

"But after 44 years without one, it's good to have the Subway Series back in any form. This one will be pretty edgy too--I promise you that."

It must be conceded that while Nick, Bob, Roger and the rest of New York are basking in a sepia-toned reverie this week, Peoria will shun the Subway Series like a Nader-Buchanan debate. Baseball's ratings this fall have been worse than WWF Smackdown's, and now the fall classic looks to middle America like Sodom vs. Gomorrah. But for all sorts of reasons, some of them having to do with baseball, it's too bad these games won't play west of the Hudson.

Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter and Mets catcher Mike Piazza are the very definition of franchise players, dramatic and fearless. The Mets' Al Leiter and Mike Hampton and the Yanks' Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens and Orlando Hernandez are premier starting pitchers in a sport suffering a famine of starting pitching. The sudden power of Yankees left fielder David Justice, obtained in a summer trade, and the constant production of Mets second baseman Edgardo Alfonzo will spice the series, as will whatever surprises Timo Perez brings to the ball park. Signed by the Mets as a free agent last spring, the diminutive 23-year-old Dominican got his break when outfielder Derek Bell was injured early in the play-offs. Perez hit safely in eight straight games leading to the World Series and ignited rally after rally with a swing-and-scoot style honed during four seasons in Japan.

There's lots of gossipy stuff to the Series too. Yankees skipper Joe Torre, who once played for and then managed the Mets until he was canned, is a cancer-surviving father figure no one dislikes, while the Mets' Bobby Valentine--once fired by George W. Bush as manager of the Texas Rangers--is a self-aggrandizing baseball "genius" few can stand. Jeter and Piazza are high-wattage men about town in the mold of DiMaggio, while Yankees head cases Paul O'Neill and Chuck Knoblauch provide riveting entertainment of another sort: you can't take your eyes off them, wondering when they'll blow. Three members of the 1986 Mets championship team are linked to the defending-champ Yanks; pitchers David Cone and Doc Gooden are on the roster, and tormented outfielder Darryl Strawberry, who is trying to recover from his own cancer as well as a long wrestling match with substance abuse, is still in the fold contractually and spiritually.

There are 8 million story angles in the Subway Series, and it's a shame the best won't play out. All of Gotham is upset that Torre is shielding Clemens by pitching the notorious headhunter only in Yankee Stadium, where the American League's designated-hitter rule says pitchers can't bat and therefore can't get plunked. Mets fans know and Yankees fans suspect that Clemens purposely beaned Piazza during a midsummer game in the Bronx, and in this eye-for-an-eye city, there's a law about facing the music. Says Knoblauch of the Series: "I hope everyone comes out of it safe," but he speaks for himself. Speaking for New York is Mike Padden, a legal-aid lawyer who lives in Manhattan, works in Brooklyn, has represented some pretty scuzzy characters from Staten Island, roots for the team in the Bronx, has attended a game or two in Queens and has downed a beer or three at Gallagher's. "Clemens is my guy, but I'd like to see him digging in against Leiter or Hampton," says Padden, popping peanuts. "This Series absolutely should have a bench-clearing brawl. Hey, this is New York. Let's have some fun."

The city hardly has to worry about that these days. Both football teams, the Jets and the Giants, are winning. Hillary's slugging it out with Rick Lazio every day for a U.S. Senate seat. Every night the mayor's estranged wife acts in a play called The Vagina Monologues while the mayor--an over-the-moon Yankees fan who is also fighting cancer--is enthusiastically dating another gal, taking in ball games and showing up at press conferences in a Yankees jacket and cap. "It's the place to be," says Nick succinctly.

"I hear the rest of the country's not watching," says Kahn. Too bad, he figures. If they tuned in, they'd see that "New York is back on top. Like it or not, folks, we're back. It's not true that everybody with a brain moved to Houston or Silicon Valley."

And for whom would Casey, soul of the Series, be rooting this week? "Whoever was paying him," says Creamer. "I suspect that would be the Mets, still trotting him out at 110." They would prop him up on the mound, and the Old Professor would peer in at the Yankees bench. After a dramatic pause, he would flagrantly thumb his nose.

The rumble began in the Bronx over the weekend; it moves to Queens midweek. Bring a helmet.