A Yankee of Different (Pin)stripe

Remember those old newspaper contests with a figure or a scene in a box on the page with the slug line underneath, “What’s wrong with this picture?” And to win, you would have to find several things out of line with it?

Well, I thought of that the other day as I stood in a locker room at Anaheim and there, before me, stood a baseball player wearing No. 6 in the drab gray and navy blue of the New York Yankees.

Steve Sax as a New York Yankee? Saxie in the traveling gray or the pinstripes of the most haughty, imperious team in the long annals of the game, the House of Lords of baseball? Wait a minute! What’s wrong with this picture?

Plenty.

I mean, first of all, Steve Sax is a guy who runs out bases on balls. The Yankees just stand there and swat home runs.

Steve is like the little kid with his cap on sideways and his socks sliding around his ankles. He grins a lot, chirps, does imitations of you behind your back.

Yankees don’t do things like that. Yankees just stand around and glare. Yankees are just morose capitalists, not cut-ups. The J. P. Morgans of organized baseball. Bankers, not ballplayers.

What is Steve Sax doing in the house that Ruth built? Saxie belongs on a sandlot, in a street stickball game.

I mean, ask yourself, would Willie Mays ever be a Yankee? Would Pete Rose? Nah!

We all know what Yankees are like. Glum. Big league frowners. Poker-faced. Elegant.

Yankees are Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Dave Winfield. You think those guys ever got their suits dirty? Yankees’ caps don’t fall off. Yankees could play the game in top hats, white ties and tails. In fact, the top hat is in their insignia.

None of this unseemly enthusiasm goes down with the Yanks. They just kind of beat you with this impersonal perfection, like a guy clubbing a mule.

The Yankees treat everybody as if they came to do the wash, scrub the floors. The Yankees were the first to have carpets on the floor. Yankee Stadium was such an awesome edifice, the first three-decker, that ordinary mortals got the bends just walking into it.

The Yankees never had guys whose shirts hung out. They were as dour as morticians. You always figured the Yankee clubhouse should have stained-glass windows and that you were expected to genuflect as you walked in, take your hat off, wipe your feet, state your business. You didn’t get an interview with a Yankee player, you got an audience. You felt as if you might be expected to kiss his World Series ring.

Sax will talk to anybody. The only thing Sax hates worse than sitting still is keeping quiet.

Sax should have a uniform with a little red in it. Also, a little dirt.

The Yankees were Wall Street’s team. Saxie looks more like Sesame Street.

The Yankees never look like they’re having any fun. You don’t joke around in the Yankee locker room. It’s more like a board room. You’d think they were making steel.

The Yankees are an acquired taste. Not for everybody. They’re not hot dogs and Cracker Jack. They’re caviar and olives.

The Mets are for everybody. So are the Dodgers.

The Yankees aren’t America’s team. They’re Park Avenue’s. Southampton’s.

It’s not a team, it’s a board of directors. Other teams wear nicknames on their home uniforms. Not the Yankees. They just wear NY. They put you in your place.

Saxie’s not going to have any idea how to play the part of a Yankee. It’s like putting a chimney sweep in Buckingham Palace.

You figure they probably won’t even speak to him till 1990, at the earliest. You don’t just walk into the Yankee clubhouse and say, “Howzit, guys?” Yankees stand on ceremony.

And then, there’s the tradition. All those plaques in the outfield. Saxie is following in the line of Yankee infielders, who were polite, dignified, reserved. If you said hello to Frankie Crosetti, he would bite your head off.

Even among second basemen--Tony Lazzeri, Joe Gordon, George Stirnweiss, Gil McDougald and Bobby Richardson--there weren’t too many holler guys. Only Billy Martin was even remotely like Steve Sax.

Anyway, the Yankees don’t play the game of baseball the way Steve Sax plays it. Steve is a leadoff man. And the Yankees already have one. Only, their leadoff man hits home runs, 69 in his first three years. That’s the way the Yankees play this game.

A lot of people thought Steve Sax would be climbing the walls of Yankee Stadium, dropping notes out the window, screaming, “Help! I’m a prisoner of New York.”

Steve scoffs. He loves it there, he says. The Yankees know his name. Nobody says, “Hey! No. 6! Whatever your name is!”

The fans haven’t been on his case. Yet. But then, he’s batting over .300.

“You think I haven’t heard boos in Dodger Stadium?” he yells. “When I was making those bad throws?”

A lot of guys would be glad of a move to New York because they would be part of the mystique of the Yankees, would be in the glorious raiment of Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri and Mantle. Saxie scorns that sentimentality.

So why is he happy to be a Yankee?

“I have only half as much a commute as I had in L.A.!” he yells. “I can be at the ballpark in 25 minutes, instead of an hour.”

There’s an old joke about the tourist who asks the old Jewish violinist, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” And the old man answers, “Practice, my boy, practice!”

You ask Steve Sax how to get to Yankee Stadium and he says, “The George Washington Bridge.”

For a lot of people, New York would be a sentence. For Sax, it is an escape. He still feels underappreciated in L.A.

“I knew 10 minutes (into the negotiations) that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted from the Dodgers,” he says. “The Yankees were right up front. They told me right away what they would do. They wanted me.”

Still and all, Sax is not really a Yankee yet. He hasn’t yet been criticized publicly by the owner.

Of course, George Steinbrenner may be like the rest of the Yankees. He doesn’t even recognize you’re there until you’ve been there a full year or so. When he unloads, Sax may become a Yankee after all.