Bruce the Blog

A Yankee fan on CBS Newsradio 88 Friday morning after his team eked out, by the skin of their teeth, a lucky win over the Phillies: “We’ve got the momentum now.” It is kind to call this the self-delusion of sports fans who irrationally think their home team is above reproach. It is realistic to call this plain dumb. It is the same bumptious behavior that prompts fans to boo the stars on opposing teams: “You’re so damn good, I’m going to boo you and say you suck, because I wish you did suck.”

After watching WS G1, nobody in their right mind would aver after a single win in the next game that the Yanks had momentum — or even Mo-mentum. Their cause was helped no small amount by a very close missed call at first base on Chase Utley that turned a first-and-third-with-two-out-and-Ryan-Howard-at-the-plate nail biter of an 8th inning into a double play inning ender. Funny how those irrational shouts of “Kill the Ump!” by the beneficiary team of a bad call can turn on a dime into “Hail the Ump!”

Mariano Rivera got his six outs to close the contest, but he also did not look regular-season-invincible. This Phillies club is scary if you’re a Yankee fan — or at least a realistic, objective Yankee fan. There’s something about the Phillies that seems tougher and more resilient and more explosive than the Bronx Bombers, who really bombed in Game 1 against Cliff Lee. The A-bombless A-Rod, uh, bombed in both games.

Even the Phillies fans are gnarlier and snarlier and smugger than Yankees fans. That’s the DNA of every Philly sports fan, from those who worshipped the Broad Street Bullies to the 76ers’ brigade to the erstwhile Eagles nest of vipers. Everyone knows about how those Eagles toughs in the stands pelted St. Nick with snowballs.

But that’s far from an isolated incident illustrating the low self-esteem of this city’s fan base. During the ugly players strike of 1982, I was living in Philadelphia and remember rabid fans outside the stadium, who were opposed to the scab players, actually taunting little kids leaving the game. Then, when my late son Harrison and I attended the 2002 NBA All-Star Game in The Spectrum, the nasties showered boos on Laker Kobe Bryant, apparently the price he paid for having the bad sense to hail from Philadelphia. “You’re one of our own? Then we hate you that much more, you West Coast pansy!”

Between the ‘82 players strike and that scene 20 years later, it convinced me the appellation “City of Brotherly Love” was meant in pure irony. With incidents like those, when it comes to its sports fans, the town I lived in for three years is more worthy of being known as “City of Pugnacious Punks.”

Jimmy Rollins fits the mold with his bragadocious comment that his team will be nice and let the Yankees win one game. Thing is, he may be right. This lifelong Yankees fan who stopped wearing rose-colored glasses when Mo threw that fateful pitch to Luis Gonzalez of the D-backs in 2001, thinks it’ll be the Phillies in 6.

“City of Peekskill resources may not be used to promote partisan, political or religious events and ideologies.”

That’s the operative phrase in the Policy Statement given to anyone who requests access to Government Channel 78. The document, provided to us by the office of Mayor Mary Foster, is dated April 29, 2005 and signed by then-City Manager Daniel Fitzpatrick, who served in the administration of Mayor John Testa.

It is the none-too-specific language in this document that is being invoked to justify the removal from channel 78, and from the City of Peekskill website, of the October 21 debate for City Mayor and County Legislature held at the Paramount Center and sponsored by North County News and moderated by this writer. So, I am not a disinterested observer by any means, and do not pretend to be.  The public forum also featured statements by all candidates for City Council seats.

For starters, the 2005 date on the policy statement clarifies, for those who jumped to uninformed conclusions, that the policy is not the invention of the current administration. However, Mayor Foster’s administration, as with those before hers, is left to interpret the operative phrase above, which does not include the term “debate.” Not surprisingly, the word “censorship” has been heard during this dustup.

So this and previous administrations in City Hall since April 2005 apparently equate a debate with the words “partisan” and political” in justifying why debates don’t appear on channel 78 or online at its website.

That is a provably bogus argument. Here’s why.

1) The words “partisan” and “political” arguably apply to a city council meeting, which is not banned from the government channel or government website.  A debate is a public forum held to inform the electorate, as is a city council meeting.

2) At the federal level, Public Broadcasting Service (aka PBS) is a government channel that telecasts debates and posts both bipartisan AND partisan political forums on its website.

3) If a debate truly were bona fide “campaign material,” as City Hall interprets it, then that would make debate sponsors — typically news organizations like ours or a TV network for a Presidential debate — party to the candidates’ campaigns, instead of neutral, third-party hosts of the debate.

4) A debate is not partisan, but bipartisan.

When I expressed the above point of view to Mayor Foster, she allowed that the policy and how it is interpreted could stand a review. Here is her comment to me, made on Oct. 28, 2009:

“I plan to raise this policy issue at our next council meeting and ask that our city attorney (who agreed with the City Manager to move the debates off the city website and city channel) investigate this further, to seek outside opinions and copies of policies from other municipalities, and to formalize a recommendation to the council about clarification to, or revision to, our existing policy.”

I don’t quite get the attorney part, because this is not a legal issue as far as I can tell. Still, the Mayor’s approach is at least a good start to fixing what is a misguided interpretation of the words “political” and “partisan” and a flat-out wrong definition of a debate. The only acceptable end result is to allow debates hosted by neutral third-parties to air on Government Channel 78 and be posted on the City of Peekskill website. For the city to think that the policy as worded gives it carte blanche to ban debate videos from its public channels is a prime example of unnecessary government intervention through the over-reaching of its authority.

But, like I said up there, I’m a highly biased participant in this particular debate, and have a vested interest in seeing debates — whether they are the ones we produce or sponsored by others — available to as wide an audience as possible.  After all, isn’t Bigger Is Better the American Way?