Those of you hoping for my complete recap of the ballgame can expect its arrival later this afternoon. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt…

By the time of David Ortiz’s home run off of Boomer Wells, I had reached the point of surrender. As my brother and my cousin had filed out the door in the top of the eighth inning, I began composing a concession speech of sorts. Words to the effect that it had been a great run this October, but we all knew going into it that this Yankee team was good but flawed, that the strength of their starting pitching camouflaged the true weakness of their bullpen beyond Mariano Rivera, and it was only a matter of time before the glue finally melted and the walls came crumbling down, and hats off to the Sox for finding that soft underbelly with their relentless offense. As I thought these things, I wasn’t so much saddened but relieved, detached and philosophical.

But, to borrow a line from The Godfather, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. And it took a hat trick of sorts, but I found my Rally Totem.

Back in late September 1999 my pal Nick and I took a baseball trip to the midwest to see Tiger Stadium before it closed, as well as Jacobs Field in Cleveland, and Wrigley Field in Chicago. I had purchased a brand new Yankees cap for the occasion; my old one, already salt-stained as it was, had fallen into a beer puddle at the Stadium and I made the mistake of trying to get it dry-cleaned, with disastrous results. But in my packing frenzy, I forgot to include the new cap, so I arrived in Cleveland hatless, and I bit the bullet to purchase yet another Yankee cap at Jacobs, much to the vendor’s disgust (the Yanks were playing the Indians that day). That one became my gamer; I was wearing it at the Stadium the night the Yanks won the ’99 World Series, and it’s stayed with me ever since, creases and salt stains and all.

But something happened this October. I wore the hat to two postseason games, both of which the Yanks lost. At home I’d hunker down in front of the tube with the hat on as the Yanks fell behind, then inevitably I would toss it aside, and the Yanks would come back. I started to catch on, schlepping it over to Nick’s, but not wearing it, treating it as though it were some wheelchair-bound relative who could still come to Thanksgiving dinner even if he could only eat mashed potatoes through a straw. The uncomfortable conclusion I reached was that this hat had lost its mojo. It had become the anti-rally cap.

I had long since considered replacing it with that other hat, the one which missed the plane, but every time I tried that one on, it didn’t fit right — too stiff and perhaps a size too small. When I moved apartments, I found a use for that hat, however. I stuck all of the baseball-related pins I’d accumlated over the years — Basebal Hall of Fame, 2001 World Series, 100th Anniversary Yankees pin, and replica World Series pins from 1927, 1938, 1943, and 1953 — and hung it on the wall with some of my other memorablia, a display item.

So there I was in the middle of the eighth inning, alone in my apartment, locked away from the rest of the world so that I could suffer the final indignity of the Yanks losing the pennant to the Boston Red Sox in solitude. And the lightbulb went on in my head: time for a new hat. I pulled my showpiece off the wall, gave the brim a good curl, and then stretched the thing front to back as if trying to rip it apart. Stuck atop my head, it wasn’t a great fit; it looked ridiculous, but it might do.

The thing worked like a charm, and in retrospect it all makes sense. The latest addition to that hat, acquired at my last regular season home game the night Jorge DePaula flirted with perfection, was the 1927 World Series pin.

The Bambino.

More to come…