A Rocker, Sock 'em Affair

New York is a pretty big city, absorbs a lot of insults, shrugs off any number of calamities. The idea that a hillbilly from Atlanta had somehow gotten under its skin, an idea that seemed to preoccupy the rest of the nation during a midseason baseball series, ought to have been discounted from the start. New York, it turned out, couldn't care less about John Rocker and his thoughts on mass transit. Let's just say that after six months of furor over comments that appeared in this magazine, a sense of proportion has finally been restored.

Rocker, whose off-season rant about riding the Number 7 train to Shea Stadium—"next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids"—made him a poster boy for social intolerance, was tolerated just fine on his first visit back (although he's still not riding the Flushing line). Since making those comments, which cost him time and money and a lot of regard as a hot young reliever, Rocker has been a sort of cultural touchstone, greeted in one town after another as a national pariah, thelevel of antagonism (or acceptance) telling us as much about that town as that rant in SI said about Rocker. So here's what last weekend's series between his Atlanta Braves and the Mets tells us about New York: No matter what the rest of the country thinks, or even what New York's tabloids say, there's room in the Big Apple even for a redneck reliever.

That Rocker's return could be made so peaceably seems shocking, given the buildup by New York and national media, whose attendance at this series was on the magnitude of the playoffs. Of course, it helped that actual baseball was played and that so much of it was so damn good. Sure, Rocker set down the side in his only appearance. (A blister on his thumb made him unavailable for the second game, and he wasn't needed in Games 3 or 4.) It seemed a redemptive moment, almost heroic considering he had to warm up amidst an NYPD phalanx. Perhaps, as his inning of relief came a few hours after he had apologized to the crowd in a taped message shown on the Diamond Vision scoreboard, it was even endearing. But Rocker's return was overshadowed by subsequent events, some of them even less likely than Rocker becoming a rush-hour straphanger.

The series, which was supposed to be a kind of reprise of last year's League Championship Series (not to mention a battle for first place at the midpoint of the season), was a wash, the teams splitting four games. The Braves, leading the National League East by two games, claimed a moral victory, figuring any time they can escape Shea with their standing intact is a plus. But the Mets, who had to believe they were under Atlanta's thumb, having lost 18 of their previous 24 games with the Braves, may have proved a more important point.

Consider that the Mets, having lost the Rocker Ruckus opener 6-4 last Thursday night, rallied the following evening from an 8-1 deficit in the eighth inning. Powered by catcher Mike Piazza, who was in the midst of a wonderful hitting groove, the Mets scored 10 runs in that inning, nine of them with two out, the last three on Piazza's homer. They won the game 11-8. That's not necessarily why the Mets are called Amazin', although the old tag fit well enough on Friday. "I saw that happen in the minors once," said Mets manager Bobby Valentine. "But this is the majors, isn't it?"

Piazza, who had three home runs during the series, seemed to enjoy the carryover on Saturday, when he helped chase Atlanta ace Greg Maddux from the mound with a two-run homer. That damage was part of a six-run second inning that carried the Mets to a 9-1 win and began making even the players believers. "People always wondered why the Braves beat us," said Piazza afterward. "It was pretty simple. They played better."

But at that moment nobody was playing better than the Mets. Or, rather, Piazza. Although Atlanta lefthander Tom Glavine pitched his team to a 10-2 victory on Sunday, the series ended with less wonderment about Rocker's state of mind than about Piazza's place in the game. Including Sunday's solo home run off Glavine, Piazza's 24th, he had hit in 20 consecutive games and batted in at least one run in 15 straight. Only Ray Grimes, playing for the Cubs in 1922, has had a longer RBI run, and Piazza was only two short of Grimes's record. "Trust me," he said, "that record's lasted for a reason. You have to swing the bat well, obviously, but you need breaks, too."

All this action proved a distraction for some 300 members of the media, who had come from all over the country just to watch Rocker get pilloried. Now they had to write about a fairly interesting series, a promising pennant race and a player whose bat seemed to be overwhelming the league. Rocker himself had predicted it, saying in his apology that baseball was bigger than he and that his rant ought to be put behind him.

That didn't mean anybody had to ignore all the fun surrounding his return, which was plenty entertaining if not the train wreck everybody thought it would be. Rocker even contributed to the buildup by announcing his plan to enjoy some of the very diversity he had criticized last winter. He was going to ride the Number 7, presumably in the spirit of apology, and demonstrate the sincerity of his social rehabilitation. That plan was derailed when his team insisted upon more secure transportation. Although, to judge by the number of New York's Finest who were scheduled to be on the platforms along the Flushing line in anticipation of this Disoriented Express, it's hard to imagine a safer ride, short of a Popemobile.

Railway safety wasn't New York's only concern during Rocker's visit. While former mayor Edward Koch was colorfully calling for a human genome project—"They could take out his ethnic-sensitivity gene [and] what's left of his heart while they're at it"—other leaders were instituting less radical measures. At Shea, where a deluge of batteries (AA, car, whatever) was feared, a canopy was built over the visiting bullpen, and cops lined the railings (some 700 of them, 10 times normal). All in all, these were the kinds of precautions that might be taken for a visiting head of state, except that in this case beer sales were curtailed after the sixth inning instead of the seventh.