Through it all, through the pandemic and the ensuing financial sucker punches to the solar plexus, the ones fortunate enough to endure could at last see sunshine breaking through and the Boys of Summer warming their lives and livelihoods.
But it felt like bottom of the ninth, two outs, again to every Little Guy inevitably struck by collateral damage after MLB canceled the first two series of the season when hope was supposed to spring eternal.
“It’s always The Little Guy,” said Joe Bastone, owner of the historic Yankee Tavern on E. 161st in the Stadium’s shadow. “The big guys have a lot of money, and they wait it out and sometimes they even come out ahead, but The Little Guys all get hurt.”
Mike Rendino at Stan’s Sports Bar on River Ave. is one of The Little Guys.
The Bronx — not to mention Flushing — Is Burning. It is The Little Guy’s worst nightmare.
“Can they kick us any more while we’re down?” Rendino said, and somehow managed a laugh.
“I’m bewildered, to be honest with you, that we’re even having this conversation after everything we’ve gone through over the last two years in the world that they’re fighting over this and they’re not giving the fans baseball. It’s a shame.”
These are the same people who were knee-capped by the 60-game 2020 COVID season without fans and then the variants and the vaccine mandates.
“Last year with all the restrictions and everything else, it was more of a headache, but we got through it,” said Joe Michialis of the Yankee Twin Eatery Bar on River Ave. “It was a tough challenge. The last month of September, we actually got a feel of what is the future. We have a bright future in front of us, but with this lockout, it’s gonna diminish the credibility of basketball.”
The Yankee Tavern has been in existence since 1927, and boasts that Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Yogi Berra used to stop in.
“At one point, I was losing 90 percent of my business,” Bastone said. “It’s a miracle I was strong enough surviving.”
Bastone, who has been at Yankee Tavern for 36 years, has been renovating in anticipation of a return to the good old days of yesteryear. The easing of pandemic restrictions fueled him with optimism … until the players and owners struck out.
“A lot of people in this neighborhood don’t believe in the vaccine, so that was hurting us,” Bastone said. “Now it was gonna be a boost to us and with the baseball season coming in, it was gonna be a real big boost. It’s devastating.”
Michialis estimates that he spent nearly $30,000 on an outdoor seating area.
“At the end of the day, it’s 90 percent of your revenue that actually is coming from the Yankees,” he said. “The 10 percent is coming from the neighborhood because there’s no neighborhood. It’s all corporate Yankees, the courthouses, and there’s parks around here so you’re not gonna get the people walking by in front of your place.”
Peter Katsihitis has been at Court Deli on E. 161st for 15 years. “Baseball is another form of spring is coming,” he said.
Spring is coming. Will baseball be coming with it? Will Rendino get to relive the sweet memories of yesteryear?
“From the beginning to the end there’s energy in the air,” he said. “There’s always the shuffling of the people who went there knowing that it’s game day, and out-of-towners are coming, then you can start feeling people trickle in. People usually who live farther away from New York and are visiting come earlier ’cause they don’t know what’s going on around the Stadium, they want to check it all out. And then as the day builds, more people who live closer and more New Yorkers start coming in closer to game time, they have their routine, they park in the same spot that they parked in for every game since they’ve been going since they were a kid, they walk to the same spot, they order the same drink. They’re creatures of habit, our regulars.”
Life without baseball and the uncertainty over when it will return keeps the Little Guys up at night.
“It’ll be devastating for us. It’s gonna be a ghost town down here,” Michialis said.
A message to the owners and players from Katsihitis: “With all this madness that’s going on, you guys need to get it together, and give the people some kind of relief.”
A message to the owners and players from Rendino: “Smarten up. We have a sport that’s been dying as it is. They were trying to think of ways to reinvent it to make it more appealing to the next generation, and they’re doing that at a bargaining table instead of on the field trying things out right now. It’s insane. The whole world was kicked in their teeth for the last two years.
“The last thing we need to do is hurt The Little Guys.”
One last message to the owners and players: Play Ball.