Subway Series: Deja Vu All Over Again

Oct. 21, 2000 — -- Norman Kurland loved the Brooklyn Dodgers so much as a 12-year-old that he sneaked out of school and slipped into Ebbets Field without a ticket in 1956, just so he could see game two of what turned out to be New York’s last Subway Series — until now.

The editor of The Flushing Faithful, a monthly publication about the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York baseball in the 1950s, is not so excited about this year’s series because he believes the relationship between fans and their teams has grown too impersonal.

But with the first Subway Series in 44 years beginning tonight, a whole new generation of New Yorkers is going gaga over baseball, with a sea of Mets and Yankees paraphernalia on display in the city.

It’s deja vu all over again, as 1950s Yankees great Yogi Berra might say.

“I hope this lasts for four or five years,” Berra said this week. “New York fans, they know their baseball.”

But still, even the most rabid Mets and Yankees fans with memories of subway series agree with Kurland:

Times have changed since the days of 25 cent hot dogs and blue-collar players.

And baseball, while still being good-old-baseball at heart, is different, too.

“The game’s changed and it is probably less subtle,” says David Halberstam, who grew up a Yankees fan and wrote about it in Summer of ’49. “Today’s players are bigger, better and faster. [But] they don’t do certain things as well. They don’t bunt as well.”

Then there’s the designated hitter rule, artificial turf, interleague play, rowdier fans who no longer wear hats and suits to the games, higher ticket and concession prices, free agency, higher player salaries, less-accessible players and longer games.

Despite all the changes, there was similar excitement in the city over the Subway Series in 1956, the seventh such matchup in a decade, those who remember say.

Back then, newspapers published special editions, business activity ebbed noticably as series games flowed over the airwaves, kids rushed home from school to catch the broadcasts, people asked each other on the street what the score was, and fans gathered in front of storefronts to watch games on televisions.