Anasazi Ochoa, a 27-year-old USC graduate student, is a lifelong Dodgers fan. (Photo courtesy of Anasazi Ochoa)

Greg Durante, a 35-year-old occupational therapist from Brooklyn, changed his jersey, watch and shoes in hopes of bringing his Yankees better luck in Game 2. (Photo courtesy of Greg Durante)

Greg Durante was raised in a Yankee loving family, growing up in a home that had a dedicated “Yankee Room”. (Photo courtesy of Greg Durante)

From left to right: Gabriela Ortega, Kinan Ochoa, Maria Santos-Ochoa, Alejandro Ochoa, Anasazi Ochoa and her fiance Eric Fleming attended the Dodgers’ final home game of the regular season as they won the National League West. (Photo courtesy of Anasazi Ochoa)

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Anasazi Ochoa, a 27-year-old USC graduate student, is a lifelong Dodgers fan. (Photo courtesy of Anasazi Ochoa)

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So it’s Anasazi Ochoa in LA, a 27-year-old graduate student at USC.

And Greg Durante in New York; is a 35-year-old occupational therapist working at a hospital in Brooklyn.

They are on opposite ends of a monumental event that completely alters their moods and is also completely (probably) out of their control.

They don’t know each other, but in the last couple of days they’ve been meeting me, via voice notes and texts, because I wanted to find out what happens when fans stop being polite and start getting real… their teams are meeting in the World Seriess.

He’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 led 2-0 to return to New York on Monday for Game 3 of the World Series.

FRIDAY, GAME 1

12:22 p.m., New York

“A lot of emotions are really high,” says Durante, just under eight hours before the first pitch. “All morning I feel my heart pounding in my chest. It keeps going back and forth between being intense enough to run through a wall or just having a totally incomplete panic attack.”

9:27, California

Ochoa walks down Exposition Boulevard in LA, thinking about a photo he saw of Yankees slugger Aaron Judge taking batting practice in his uniform: “What about this? … a scare tactic? If this is it, I had to laugh… I feel good tonight. You know we’re going to hit first, we’re going to hit hard, we’re going to set the tone. It’s going to be a good game, but these guys seem very, very unintimidating.”

Hey, very quickly. More on these two before the first release: Durante grew up in a family of Yankees fans, in a home with a dedicated “Yankee Room” that was filled with memorabilia. “I remember,” he told me earlier in the week, “how happy I was in 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 child again.” He will be at Game 4; I never thought about spending $1,000 for a ticket. He had to do it.

Ochoa was raised a Dodger fan…in San Diego. She can thank her parents, lifelong Dodger fans, for that. And they inherited their fandom, especially from her mother’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 big part of who I am as a Dodger fan,” she said of the Dodgers’ great pitching, who died last week. “Even though I wasn’t there when he played, as a Mexican-American Dodger fan, that history carries over.”

Driving it to Friday.

All afternoon in New York, Durante receives messages like this one from a cousin: “Happy World Series Day. Let’s go (yawning) Yankees!”

Meanwhile in California, Ochoa shares, “I know I said I’m not a superstitious person, but I just thought about something: One thing I won’t do is I won’t play his ‘I love LA’ Randy Newman. only in my car after winning… that’s only reserved for our victories.”

Not a superstitious person — no, not at all — Ochoa said she still felt somewhat responsible for the Dodgers’ Game 2 loss in the National League Championship Series: “My boyfriend Eric (a Padres fan) had a Brooklyn Jackie Robinson T-shirt. , because as a black man it felt important to honor the player who broke the color barrier. He always justified that he represented Brooklyn, not LA 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 (no wash) in Game 2 vs. the Mets. We were blown away and I couldn’t help but wonder if he got some bad mojo from a disgruntled SD fan.”

19:40 Friday, New York

“Thirty minutes left and then it’s game time baby!” says Durante from a bustling bar in Staten Island. I imagine him rubbing his palms together. “I’m getting excited, really excited.”

16:41 Friday, California

Ochoa is about to watch Game 1 on her phone in the Chula Vista High School football press box with her father, Alejandro, because he’s an announcer for the Spartans. Oddly enough, life doesn’t stop for the World Series. The Lakers and Trojans games also took place on Friday, as did Chula Vista, whose school colors, Ochoa pointed out, “are also blue and white.”

At 8:43 p.m., his time, Durante writes: “ASSASSINATE THE REFEREE.”

Three minutes later, he texts again: “To show that the file was a joke, I don’t want to be arrested for conspiracy to commit murder after printing this article. But seriously, these inconsistent referees are awful and ruining the game.”

Then, at 9:47 p.m., he sends a three-second voice note: “STAAANNNTINN!!!”

Giancarlo Stanton, a Sherman Oaks Notre Dame producthe just hit a 412-foot, two-run home run to put the Yankees ahead, 2-1. Durante also writes: “I switched seats after LA scored the first run. Then HR for Stanton. I’m not moving.”

“The story of the whole season,” a somber Ochoa says in a message at 7:36 p.m. in California, where the Dodgers are yet to enter the eighth. “Runners on base and we can’t bring them home. But I still believe. It’s not over until it’s over.”

You know what happens next.

8:39 p.m., California

“Oh my God, Miriam! A freaking grand slam! Freddie Freeman! Oh, God!” Ochoa rushes, shouts, cries – overcome after Freeman’s walkoff grand slam in the 10th inning gave the Dodgers a 6-3 victory.

“… oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God! That’s right, that’s right, that’s right!”

Saturday, GAME 2

I don’t miss Durante, although I would understand if I did. I didn’t hear from him after Freeman’s heartbreaking heroics until 9:27 the next morning in New York: “What a nightmare. Worst case… I went to bed angry. I woke up angry. You want to punch something (but smart enough to realize how stupid that would be).

“I feel VERY pessimistic about the rest of the series. I have to win tonight.”

At 10:23, he adds, briefly, “I’m dead inside.”

I wonder, for the millionth time: Why do we do this to ourselves?

Ochoa texts at 8:06 a.m. as soon as she wakes up: “I still can’t believe it happened…I’m shaking.”

I say to myself: Ah, that’s why.

Durante rose from the mat. Drink coffee and go for a long walk. He calls his father for mercy, then goes and plays volleyball to “catch some sun and get my frustrations out” and otherwise “distract myself from my overwhelming dread and use all my inner strength for optimism and hope”.

Before the game starts, he lets me know, “Last night’s outfit didn’t work, so tonight we’re going with another Yankees jersey, a different watch, different shoes, and a hopeful attitude.”

Ochoa spends the day running errands and hanging out with her fiance, Eric Fleming, before grabbing a surf and turf burrito from a place near her parents’ house before the game starts a little after 5:00 p.m. “Keeping it West Coast ,” she texts about half an hour before the first release. “NYC has bodegas, SoCal has taco shops!”

Dodgers put up four runs in first three innings, build what feels like, with Dodgers starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was in chargeas a comfortable 4-1 lead.

Durante: “It’s like someone stuck a knife in my heart.”

In the fifth inning, Ochoa says, “If you can’t hear it in my voice, I’m just in a state of happiness. It’s pretty fun to be a Dodger fan right now.”

The game is close when the Yankees score once and load the bases in the ninth. But the Dodgers are coming out of it “aaaand twisting the knife,” Durante writes from The Commissioner, the popular Brooklyn bar where he watched Game 2.

“You know what?” says Ochoa afterwards 4-2 win. “It’s exciting, but it’s calm. We’re ready, I think we’re definitely ready for New York. We were ready for New York.”

Her reaction is tempered, however, because the Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani’s left shoulder was injured sliding into the second inning in the eighth inning: “All I can think about is healing thoughts for Ohtani and that’s it.”

The highs and lows, and the lows and highs of sports fandom. Proving and rebuking Einstein’s theory, as if he realized for Dodgers and Yankees fans: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. A winner and a loser.

To the unindoctrinated it may seem silly, what we let sports do to us. But what does sport do? for us, that’s the magic.

Durante’s best explanation: “It’s an animal and primal reaction, completely visceral and uncontrollable. It’s a situation that is completely out of my control, but the emotions I feel are in contrast to that.

“I really think it’s love,” he added. “I like this team”

Ochoa wrote, “I watch baseball because of my family roots. The Dodgers are the team that brings us together in the midst of 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 heartaches of the past few years, the final words of the late great Vin Scully have always echoed in my mind: ‘But, you know what, there will be a new day and eventually a new year and when the coming winter gives way to spring, ooh, rest assured, once again, it will be Dodger baseball time. “

Originally published: October 27, 2024 at 12:56 p.m