Calling the Strike

The abbreviation of the 1994 baseball season depressed millions of Americans, but it was crushing for fans of the New York Yankees. What a team we had: not Murderers’ Row, maybe, but strong up the middle, deep on the bench, with solid hitting through the entire lineup, plus the miraculous Jimmy Key. Dammit, it was our year. Or so it looked so late in the year that many of us had cleared our calendars for October.

Nothing good has come of this, which is a shock to the system, because baseball fans are used to finding something good in the direst of circumstances. Especially Yankee fans, for whom the past decade, on the field and off, hovered between the boring and the excruciating until the recent turnaround. Ev...