Marinate your spite in the rich juices of history

I’m not much for metaphysics, but if evil exists in this world, it has been temporarily vanquished by the Detroit Tigers. Like any good high, the end of the Yankees’ season makes me feel warm and mellow and hungry for more. But already I’m staring to sober up, and I’m fresh out of potato chips. Fortunately, ESPN’s Page Two staff has come through with a recap of the 10 Greatest Yankee Collapses in history. As with all “greatest ever” lists, this one is conspicuously larded with recent events. Not that this is inherently a problem. It should merely remind us that such exercises are always guided by the needs of the present. That is, the current Yankee roster is objectively loathsome and meretricious, and this list helps reaffirm that by including “collapses” from five of the past six years — a genealogy of sucktacular performances that should indeed be heards as one long, beautiful tone. (By way of analogy, the answer to the question of whether George W. Bush is the worst president ever is less revealing than the fact that many historians are having the conversation in the first place). Nonetheless, by any conceivable definition of “collapse,” the glorious Yankee implosions of 2001 (to the Diamondbacks) and 2004 (to the Red Sox) will likely endure and keep their rightful place among the most fantastic events in human history, comparable to Galileo’s discovery of the Law of Falling Bodies or the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I wonder, though, why the editors didn’t include the 1926 World Series, won by the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Perhaps it’s uncouth to ridicule Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Tony Lazzeri and the like; perhaps it’s because the 1926 series preceded three decades of near-complete Yankee hegemony. But the Bronx Bombers unquestionably choked in 1926, and I fail to see why the team’s early exits from the playoffs in 2002 or 2006 were any more humiliating. The Yankees, fielding a lineup soon to be known as “Murderer’s Row,” were heavy favorites in that series and actually led three games to two before being garroted 10-2 in the sixth game. In the deciding contest, the Yankees trailed 3-2 in the bottom of the ninth. With two out, Babe Ruth walked; with the capable Bob Meusel batting, Ruth made the incomprehensible decision to break for second. He was thrown out by about five feet — the first and only time a World Series has ended on an attempted steal.

Although all this happened 44 years before my birth, the 1926 World Series still makes me smile.