So there’s Anasazi Ochoa in L.A., a 27-year-old graduate student at USC.
And Greg Durante in New York; he’s a 35-year-old occupational therapist working at a hospital in Brooklyn.
They’re at opposite ends of a monumental event that’s altering their moods entirely and that’s also entirely (probably) out of their control.
They don’t know each other, but for the past couple days, they’ve been checking in with me, via voice memos and text messages, because I wanted to find out what happens when fans stop being polite and start getting real … while their teams are meeting in the World Series.
She’s a Dodgers fan. He’s a Yankees fan. And they’re both incredibly good sports, though, for now, Ochoa is in better spirits; her team leading 2-0 heading back to New York for Game 3 of the World Series on Monday.
FRIDAY, GAME 1
12:22 p.m., New York
“A lot of emotions running high real high,” Durante says, a little less than eight hours before the first pitch. “All morning I can feel my heart pounding in my chest. It’s still just going back and forth between being amped up enough to run through a wall or just have a total incomplete panic attack.”
9:27 a.m., California
Ochoa is walking down Exposition Boulevard in L.A., thinking about a photo she saw of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge taking batting practice in uniform: “Like, what is up with that? … an intimidation tactic? If that’s what that is, I had to laugh … I’m feeling good about tonight. You know we’re gonna strike first, strike hard, set the tone. It’s gonna be a good game, but these guys seem like very, very not intimidating.”
Hey, real quick. Some more background on these two, before the first pitch: Durante grew up in a family of Yankees fans, in a house with a dedicated “Yankee Room” that was filled with memorabilia. “I remember,” he told me earlier in the week, “how happy I was throughout the 90s, when they were winning those championships (three out of four between 1996 and 2000) … so just them winning makes me happy, makes me feel like a kid again.” He’ll be at Game 4; didn’t have a second thought about spending $1,000 for a ticket. Had to do it.
Ochoa was raised a Dodger fan … in San Diego. She can thank her parents, lifelong Dodger fans, for that. They inherited their fandom too, particularly on her mom’s side, because Anasazi’s grandfather, Roberto, a Mexican immigrant, was swept up in Fernandomania in the early 1980s.
“Fernando Valenzuela’s impact is a huge part of my identity as a Dodger fan,” she said of the Dodgers pitching great, who died last week. “Even though I wasn’t there when he was playing, as a Mexican-American Dodger fan, that history is passed down.”
Leading her to Friday.
All afternoon in New York, Durante is getting texts, like this one, from a cousin: “Happy world series day. Let’s [bleeping] go Yankees!”
Meanwhile, in California, Ochoa shares: “I know I said I wasn’t a superstitious person, but I just thought of something: One thing I won’t do is that I will not play Randy Newman’s ‘I love L.A.’ I will only in my car after we won … that’s only reserved for our victories.”
Not a superstitious person – nope, not at all – Ochoa said she did, however, feel somewhat responsible for the Dodgers’ Game 2 loss in the National League Championship Series: “My fiancé Eric [a Padres fan] had a Brooklyn Jackie Robinson jersey, because as a Black man he felt important to honor the player who broke the color barrier. He always justified that it was representing Brooklyn, not L.A. When the Dodgers won the NLDS [against the Padres], he gave it to me, he didn’t want anything blue in his closet anymore … I wore it for the first time (without washing) on Game 2 vs the Mets. We got blown out, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it had bad mojo from a disgruntled SD fan.”
7:40 p.m. Friday, New York
“Thirty minutes left and then it’s game time, baby!” Durante says from a bustling bar on Staten Island. I picture him rubbing his palms together. “Starting to get excited, real excited.”
4:41 p.m. Friday, California
Ochoa is about to watch Game 1 on her phone in the Chula Vista High School football press box, beside her dad, Alejandro, because he’s the Spartans’ public address announcer. Oddly enough, life doesn’t stop for the World Series. The Lakers’ and Trojans’ games went on Friday, too, as did Chula Vista’s, whose school colors, Ochoa pointed out, “are also blue and white.”
At 8:43 p.m. his time, Durante texts: “ASSASSINATE THE UMPIRE.”
Three minutes later, he texts again: “Let the record show that was in jest, I do not want to be arrested on conspiracy to murder after this article prints. But seriously, these inconsistent umpires are awful and ruin the game.”
Then, at 9:47 p.m., he sends a three-second long voice memo: “STAAANNNTINN!!!”
Giancarlo Stanton, a Sherman Oaks Notre Dame product, has just hit a 412-foot two-run home run to put the Yankees ahead, 2-1. Durante also texts: “I changed spots that I was standing after L.A. scored their first run. Then HR for Stanton. I’m not moving.”
“Story of the whole season,” a glum Ochoa says in a message at 7:36 p.m. in California, where the Dodgers still trail entering the eighth. “Runners on base and we can’t bring them home. But I still believe. It’s not over till it’s over.”
You know what happens next.
8:39 p.m., California
“Oh my god, Mirjam! A freaking grand slam! Freddie Freeman! Oh my god!” Ochoa blubbers, shouts, cries – overcome after Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning gave the Dodgers a 6-3 victory.
“… oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness! That’s right, that’s right, that’s right!”
SATURDAY, GAME 2
I don’t lose Durante, though I would’ve understood if I had. I don’t hear from him after Freeman’s heartbreaking heroics until 9:27 the next morning in New York: “What a nightmare. Worst case scenario… Went to bed furious. Woke up furious. Want to punch something (but smart enough to realize how stupid that would be).
“Feeling VERY pessimistic about the rest of the series. Need to win tonight.”
At 10:23 a.m., he adds, succinctly: “I am dead inside.”
I wonder, for the millionth time: Why do we do this to ourselves?
Ochoa messages at 8:06 a.m., as soon as she wakes up: “I still can’t believe that happened… I was SHAKING.”
I tell myself: Ah, that’s why.
Durante gets up off the mat. Has coffee and goes for a long walk. Calls his dad to commiserate, and then goes and plays volleyball to “get some sunshine and take out my frustrations” and otherwise “distract myself from my overwhelming dread and use all my inner strength for optimism and hope.”
Before the game begin, he lets me know: “Last night’s T-shirt didn’t work, so tonight we go with a different Yankees T-shirt, a different watch, different shoes and a hopeful attitude.”
Ochoa spends her day doing assignments and hanging with her fiancé, Eric Fleming, before grabbing a surf and turf burrito from a spot near her parents’ house before the game started, a little after 5 p.m. “Keeping it West Coast,” she texts about a half-hour before the first pitch. “NYC has bodegas, SoCal has taco shops!”
The Dodgers crank out four runs in the first three innings, build what feels, with Dodgers starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto dealing, like a comfortable 4-1 lead.
Durate: “It’s like someone is plunging a knife into my heart.”
In the fifth inning, Ochoa says: “If you can’t hear it from my voice, I’m just in a state of bliss. It’s pretty fun to be a Dodger fan right now.”
The game gets closer when the Yankees score once and load the bases in the ninth. But the Dodgers get out of it “aaaaaand twist the knife,” Durante writes from The Commissioner, the popular bar in Brooklyn where he’s watched Game 2.
“You know what?” Ochoa says after the 4-2 victory. “It’s exciting, but it’s calm. We’re ready, I think we’re definitely ready for New York. We’ve been ready for New York.”
Her reaction is subdued, though, because Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s left shoulder was injured sliding into second in the eighth inning: “All I can think about is healing thoughts for Ohtani and that’s it.”
The highs and lows, and lows and highs of sports fandom. Proving and reproving Einstein’s theory, as if he figured it out for Dodgers and Yankees fans: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. A winner and a loser.
To the unindoctrinated it might seem silly, what we let sports do to us. But what sports do for us, that’s the magic.
Durante’s best explanation: “It’s an animalistic and primal reaction, completely visceral and borderline uncontrollable. It’s a situation that’s completely out of my control yet the emotions I feel are contrasting to that.
“I really think it’s out of love,” he added. “I love this team.”
Wrote Ochoa: “I watch baseball because of my family roots. The Dodgers are the team that brings us together, amidst our hectic schedules and life journeys.
“Baseball gives me hope, brings me joy, and reminds me to never give up,” she added. “Despite the countless heartbreaks these last few years, the final broadcast words of the late great Vin Scully always rang in my mind: ‘But, you know what, there will be a new day, and, eventually, a new year, and when the upcoming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be time for Dodger baseball.’ ”
