Yankee Fans

One of the funniest, maybe even most bizarre, examples I’ve ever seen of this happened during a New York hostage situation quite a number of years back. It was during the summer in an apartment house in New York, no AC out in the hallway, and if it was less than one hundred degrees in the stairwell where we all camped out, then I’m six-eight.

We have this situation with a subject locked inside an apartment with a weapon, and there’s no phone, no way to communicate except shouting through the door. Literally.

And the subject is not exactly Mr. Sunshine.

So we go around and around for a while, everybody in full protective gear and behind ballistic shields, the whole shebang, sweat rolling down our backsides. Different members of the team take on the role of lead negotiator, only to meet with what is called “invective” in polite company. I think we all had a turn at trying to get this guy to talk, and did about as well as a single A minor league baseball player would do trying to get a hit against Pedro Martinez in his heyday. No rapport, no nothing except a hall full of sweat and four-letter words.

So into the middle of this steaming situation comes a new negotiator. It happens that it was his day off but he was in the neighborhood, and so he stopped by to see if he could help out. Even veterans do that, by the way; it wasn’t like he was shining up to the commander or anything.

So he goes to the boss and says, “Mind if I give it a try?”

The commander figures, why not, it will give the other guys a break at least.

So the new negotiator puts on the vest, gets behind the ballistic shield, and waddles out there, trailing sweat along the floor.

“Hello inside, just wanted to say I’m out here blah-blah-blah.”

The response began: “X#@#$#% you!” I’ll leave the rest of that sentence to your imagination.

“Hey, not a problem,” said the newbie. “I can’t really hang around anyway. I got tickets to the game tonight, and I got to get going soon.”

“Game? What game?”

“Yankee game.”

“How’d you get tickets to that? It’s been sold out for weeks.”

“Oh, I got this buddy who knows somebody.”

“You’re really going to the Yankee game?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re going to win.”

“I hope so. But the way Rivers is playing . . .”

“Ah, Rivers . . .”

Yeah, you guessed it. We’re sweating our uniforms off, and these guys start talking about baseball. I guess the real highlight came when they started talking about baseball cards. Sheez.

“So listen, one Yankee fan to another, you want to come out of there?” said the negotiator finally.

“One fan to another, I’m coming out.”

Unbelievable.

But it happened. They established a basis to negotiate via baseball, and then just about skipped over the negotiating part. Life should always be like that, right?

So here this guy is, on the floor, being cuffed, and the negotiator says, “Well listen, like I said, I’m going to come down with you to the station and go through the booking process with you, so no sweat.”

Guy looks up and says, “Listen, man, don’t miss that baseball game on account of me, okay? That’s more important.”

Only in New York.