The Guru on baseball

Baseball is the only sport where, no matter how old or out of shape you are, you are utterly convinced that you could go down to the dugout, grab a bat, and get up and knock one of CC's fastballs out of the park.

That's why baseball is so great.*

See you at the game . . .

* I paraphrased a bit. It's fun editing an editor.

The homestand

So, tying up the loose ends on the new Yankee Stadium -

- I found the sushi place. It's right behind the main hall (duh) on the main level. My spicy tuna roll looked a little battered by the time I reached my seat, but it tasted OK. Of course, you're paying Stadium prices . . .

- My bet is that the calorie counts next to the beer prices will do as much to curb excessive drinking as Anti-DWI ads will. Maybe more . . .

- Speaking of beer, the selection is much better than at the old Stadium. But it still could use some tweaking. And, of course, you're paying Stadium prices . . .

- We did find the good way out - got in the parking lot in under six minutes. Without running . . . now if I could only find a good spot for a cigar . . .

Not everybody's lost in the Bronx




Some smart fans have a plan to save Gate 2. Details here.

Everybody's still figuring the place out . . .




So I get to the Stadium early and I'm looking for a good spot to smoke a cigar, when John Sterling* walks up, looking kind of lost.

I pointed him in the right direction.

* John Sterling = the voice of the Yankees.

Baseball in quotes



I guess my feelings on the new Stadium are best summed up by the baseball bat, which is now encircled and encapsulated by a set of stairs. They seem like a set of quotes around it - transforming it somehow from an easy place to meet people into an "historical" monument.

Quotes included.

The new stadium does that to the spirit of the old stadium, and baseball in general - the history is encapsulated in quotes.

But the references to the past are, well, just references. There's no actual history at the Stadium. And in fact that's one of its attractions - many of the people who are talking so positively about it are praising how clean it looks.

In the first weekend, balls were flying out of the park. Maybe that was Babe's revenge. The Yankees have claimed that the dimensions of the field are exactly the same, but anyone who has spent a lot of time there can look at right field and know the wall doesn't curve the same way. It doesn't really matter - unless you're Chen Ming Wang - but the insistence that history is being preserved is irksome.

It's too early to tell whether the park really does encourage home runs . . . and it's too early to tell if the "this park could be anywhere" feel I get walking in is a true emotion, or simply a stubborn reaction from someone who went to games at the old park since he was too young to know the difference between a fastball and a curve.

Or sour grapes at losing my field boxes.

For the moment, I struggle to keep an open mind. And more than anything else, the new Stadium has reminded of this: baseball is baseball, whether you play it at Yankee Stadium, or the sandlot across from your house.

Yankee Stadium, as seen from the roof - I mean, my seats . . .

Cigars

We're standing across the street from the ballpark and these two old guys come up and start sniffing around.

Literally.

"I love that aroma," says one. He points to my cigar. "Reminds me of real baseball."

Forty or fifty years' worth of experiences follow in the space of a few sentences. We don't really need words. We have cigars.

"Those days are gone," he says wistfully, shaking his head. Then he goes up the street to find out where the new entrance to his seats are.

Randy from PA


I rode to the Yankee game the other day with Randy from PA. He's a greeter at Wal*Marts, which is a pain because they've just changed his work hours to two-eleven. The change interferes with his real avocation - Bleacher Creature.

Randy is more a Creature trainee than an actual bonafide Creature; you have to work your way into the brotherhood over a number of years. But he has the fire - along with a tattoo on his arm telling the world who his favorite team is.

Randy also knows the fielding statistics of every Yankee going back to Greg Nettles. Everybody knows batting averages and home runs, he explained, but being able to cite Celereno Sanchez's error rate on bunt attempts separates the men from the boys - or the Creatures from the wannabes.*

Me, I'm just sitting up in tier these days.

Excuse me, the Grandstands.

* Clereno had 14 errors in 71 games in 1974 . . . not going to cut it if you hit under .250. Great baseball name, though.

Yankee Stadium impressions


So yeah, we're playing hooky and checking the new ball field out. First impressions:

The bat remains, ensconced in the bridge from Metro-North and the Degan parking lots. It probably won't be the best place to meet any more, though - a bit too far from the new Stadium. And it looks less like a bat and more like a monument surrounded by a steel staircase.

The parking lot configuration & traffic flow make even less sense than before. Obviously - most of the lots were set up for the old Stadium. Tough to judge anything yet, though, especially on day games. The distance to the far lots could work out, if the close-in lots empty quickly. Then again, the 'I don't know where I'm going but I'm going there anyway' and tourist factors will be increased exponentially this year.

Things you never saw outside the old stadium: A maintenance guy sweeping up cigarettes (and cigars) from the sidewalk.

They check your car for bombs at the "preferred customer" parking lots. The other ones - hey, we can afford to lose some of the rabble, no?

There are a lot more food places scattered around, not to mention the restaurants. This will take considerably more research, but preliminary recce showed that most stands are duplicates. Haven't found the sushi place yet. The Italian deli place may or may not have been replaced by a place selling Boar's Head sandwiches. (OK as far as they go, but ham and Swiss is no replacement for prosciutto and coppacolla*, w/provolone.

The good - there are a few more places to get bass ale. The bad - they still don't have it on draft.

The garlic fries are extremely greasy, as they should be.

But they ran out of vanilla soft-serve ice cream Friday.

Contrary to rumor, none of the thousands of flat screens added to the Stadium are in the restrooms. At least not in the men's. And there are still lines. The men's doesn't smell like twenty-year-old beer, but we'll give that time.

The center video screen is massive - but figuring out where balls and strikes are tracked is tricky. (On smaller boards by the foul poles.)

More research is needed here as well, but getting out of the Stadium is not easy at all. There were massive jams Friday, when the game wasn't decided until the ninth. We'll have to see how this goes, because it could be a major design flaw.

The place looks nice, open and modern. Does it have New York character . . . ??? But there are definitely characters - guitar man was in the stands. Didn't see Stan and his signs, though. Maybe he got sidetracked in the preferred customer parking lot.

Finding the perfect spot for cigar smoking will take quite a bit more work, but the low wall along 161st shows promise.

And finally:

The view from the cheap seats is a hell of a lot better when the Yankees win.

* Or as it is pronounced in NY, 'pro-shoot n gab-a-goal.'

What Red Sox fans do




. . . while waiting for the season to begin.

Dream on, dude . . .

Lowering the prices would be too easy

Item: The NY Yankees have hired a high-rolling real estate company to try to sell premium seats at the new stadium.

Seems about a fourth of the real estate in the prime areas hasn't been sold. What a shock. I mean, seats that went in the range of sixty bucks are now costing . . . what? three-fifty?

But shouldn't someone tell Randy Levine that real estate agents aren't exactly pounding the ol' pill these days?

Just in time for Christmas . . .




If you're going to pay Manny $50-$75 mil (!!!!) for three years, wouldn't you be better off getting this guy? Makes sense to me . . . except for the $50-75 mil part . . .

Then there's the tweaking-Boston's-nose part, which undoubtedly went into the equation. And no doubt Hank and Hal figured they had to do something to justify charging $100 per seat in the upper deck* . . .

*Pardon me; I believe that's now called the Terrace Level, Premium Seating area . . .

Thanks Moose . . . we miss you already.

Meet the new boss . . .*



As just about every baseball fan knows, the Yankees are opening a new stadium this year to "enhance the fan experience" - and coincidentally wring every last available dollar from their pockets.

Hank, Hal and the gang invited the press over the other day to talk about how great the technology is going to be. To demonstrate, they showed an in-Stadium traffic report that will be available via wireless connection throughout the stands . . . a report which indicated that there was no way out of da Bronx.

Maybe the seats fold down into beds.

* -As in the Who song, "Won't Get Fooled Again," a few bars of which are (usually) played just before the Yankees take the field before games.

My seats, second row, section 120: waiting for me now in eternity . . .


Beyond the wrecking ball

ESPN interviewed me for a documentary on the Stadium Friday. I'm pretty sure I was my usual incoherent self, so there's no danger of anything I said actually being used. But the interview did make me think about the Stadium and its last days before fading into the great maul of remembered and disremembered history.

I'm talking about Yankee Stadium, of course. If you grew up in New York, even if you're not a Yankee fan, that's what "Stadium" means.

I resisted all the forced and for-sale nostalgia crap this season, turned off by the forced hype that seemed designed more to make money than generate memories. If the people who own the Yankees really cared about the Stadium itself, they would have renovated the place; instead, tearing it down became just one more opportunity to separate fans, semi-fans, and the merely curious from their money.

But I have come to understand and appreciate the real nostalgia for the place, the memories and emotion that transcend the dollar signs. All the fans talk about the players they've seen there, the Mantles and Mattinglys and Jeters, but the real nostalgia is for the people they've been there with, the fathers and sons and brothers, the wives and lovers, the friends they've gotten drunk with and the strangers they shared a bond with in the stands.

Like my dad, who bought me so many peanuts the first time we went to a game that to this day I don't eat them any more...

My uncle, a Bronx kid who showed me all, or almost all, the joints still standing that he used to frequent before, after, and during the games. ("Ten percent of what was here once. But this place was good. And over there . . .")

Like Kit, Luce, and Melf, the best friends a derelict 13-year-old could ever have ...

The Blaze Brothers, who walked with me through East Harlem to get there ...

Smith, the Diehard, screaming at people leaving in the 7th, knowing the Yanks would come back seven runs down. (They did.) ...

Ford, who never met a beer curfew he couldn't get around ...

Jerome, who maybe can punch out a cop and an EMT on a bad day, but won't brave the sushi on a good one ...

Fred, a Mets fan who found the Dark Side impossible to resist ...

And on and on. My own history with the Stadium is somewhat checkered. I didn't tell ESPN that I'd been kicked out one and a half times for intense and earnest philosophical discussions with members of the Red Sux Nation. (One of those times is only a half because really, honestly, in my heart, I was trying to be a peacemaker. Just sometimes you have to be forceful about it.)

I also neglected to mentioned the time the piece of railroad track fell off the el and missed me by six or eight inches. (Fortunately, NYPD was right on it, surrounding the wayward iron plate so it couldn't get away.)

Or how easy it used to be to sneak beer in, or bribe an usher for a better seat. Or how old I was before I stopped getting hoarse by the second inning.

Some of these things - the fights especially - happened several lifetimes ago. Going to the Stadium was much different then, not least of all because you could walk up on game day and buy good seats from the little blue booths. But I've changed a bit myself.

I'm sure the new ballpark will be fun, and when it is replaced eighty years from now people will wax poetic about what a great place it was to see a game. But that glint in their eyes won't really be about the park; it'll be about the people they went there with, and the person they were when they did.

Thanks for being there, friends. And thank you, Yankee Stadium. You'll stand forever in our hearts.

And by the way - I ate the sushi, and lived to tell about it.

* - Why me? Dunno - I think they confused me with Studs Terkel. Musta been the stogie.

Upon further review . . .



So A-Rod gets the historical footnote of having been the first baseball player to have a home run reviewed by instant replay.

I don't like it. Not A-Rod -- hard not to like a guy who's getting it from a rock star billionaire who still looks good at whatever age Madonna says she is. It's instant replay I can't stand. (At least not to review home runs. Intimate shots of - never mind ...)

Somehow it's not baseball. Football, all right. That's a sport where brute force and technology must mesh. But baseball . . . hell, if we can't complain about the umpires, all we're left to bitch at are the outrageous prices.

Hotel TV

You can't get YES and the Yankee games, or even MLB on Fox, but you can get Eurosport.

Eurosport is the equivalent of ESPN2 ... or maybe ESPN23,456 - the main attractions are summer downhill sky jumping (you jump on grass) and beach soccer.

Both of which are incredibly interesting after a few bottles of Chianti . . .

Hotel minibars

So we're in Florence.

The beer in my hotel's minibar is 7 Euros. At the current exchange rate, that's somewhere around $11.66.

Makes the prices at Yankee Stadium look cheap.

Dolts

Parking at Yankee Stadium apparently wasn't a big enough pain in the ass, so the dimwits who control the lots there decided to make it even more fun by changing what was a simple though expensive system at the main parking garage into a complicated and expensive system. Instead of paying as you go in, they installed a system where you get a ticket, validate it (and pay), then have to insert the ticket to get the gate to go up when you leave. That system may work fine at the luxury hotel lots where these jackals have cocktails and the hired drivers deal with the snafus, but how's it going to work at the end of a nine inning 2-1 game against Boston?

A rhetorical question.

Last night it took me twenty minutes to get out - and I left in the sixth, after the Yankees were down by ten runs. And I knew the fastest way out.

According to all the lot attendants and the security people, it's exactly the nightmare that anyone who actually ever used a parking lot while attending a sporting event could have predicted. And that's with attendants standing at the gates making sure nothing goes wrong... it'll be all sorts of fun once they're gone, once the machines start crapping out, once Mr. Murphy takes an interest . . .

My only question is which will come first, a homicide, or a riot?

The real shame is there's no way to use the premise in a book . . . no one would ever believe anyone would be so stupid to set up such a system . . .