Daily Archives: April 9, 2008

Everything is cool. The Yankees aren’t scoring any runs and I haven’t had a tantrum…yet. I watched the end of yesterday’s game and saw Alex Rodriguez strike out for the fourth time. He was caught looking in his first three at bats against B. Banny, and fell behind the count quickly his fourth time up. Then he fouled off a few pitches and laid off another couple of sliders just off the plate. I had a great feeling that he was going to hit the ball hard. That something good was about to happen. I generally don’t feel that way about him, which says more about me as a nervous fan of my hometown team, than it does about Rodriguez. But he eventually chased a ball out of the zone and went down swinging.

Someone is going to pay and soon. With our heroes Jeter and Posada* hurting, it’s up to the rest of the boys to get the lead out. That’s easier said than done, particularly with Mr. Grienke on the hill for the Royals tonight. Here’s hoping Ian Kennedy comes through with a nice effort.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees.

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We should come up with a list of our favorite pet peeves. As a New Yorker, I am driven to distraction by people who block the subway doors, who have conversations smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, who walk down the street in threes side-by-side-by-side, who don’t know the golden rule that if you stay the right (walking down the stairs, a corridor, the block) you are right. One of my biggest peeves is sitting near someone on public transportation who is eating hot food. If it’s an untoasted bagel or a buttered roll, I can deal. But if it smells, I squirm. In the morning, it’s not surprising to see someone dogging a heart attack special (ham/bacon, egg and cheese on a roll) or a Cuban sandwich.

Just imagine how uptight I get.

One of the most amusing things about pet peeves is the inclination to think that your friends, family and other like-minded, sane people will share them. One day, I called up my great pal Lizzie Bottoms to rail about food on the train, assuming she’d feel the same way.

I go, “Dude, what’s your reaction when you smell food on the subway?”

“I get hungry.”

I stopped cold. Jeez, I hadn’t thought of that. Makes sense though. Then again Lizzie gets knuts when she sees people smooching and grabbing ass in public (PDA, public display of affection) where that generally doesn’t bug me at all.

Anyhow, I was on the subway this morning. We were still way uptown and the car wasn’t packed yet. An older gentleman sat two seats away from me. He was the kind of guy who looked like he was wearing a toupee even though, on closer inspection, it looked like his real hair.

He broke out a roll. I waited to see if a smell was going to soon follow, indicating that it was something warm. But it wasn’t. Just an plain buttered roll. Soon, a high school kid got on the train and sat between us. The older man asked the kid if he was taking math in school. The kid mumbled a response which evidentally gave the older guy–who, it soon became clear, was not only touched in the head but a math teacher himself–permission to give a uninterrupted lecture on trig, Isaac Newton and all sorts of stuff about math I never wanted to know.

The poor kid didn’t have it in him to tell the guy to shut up, so the old man went on…and on. I put down my book, unable to concentrate. The guy didn’t have any interest in making a connection with the kid, just on hearing the sound of his own voice. I wanted to say something to him and then thought, ah, don’t be such a hard ass, he’s harmless. Still, I was dumbfounded.

Finally, the old man got up and left. I asked the kid if he knew him and he said no. Then I started in about how incredible it is that some people can just go on like that. The kid tuned me out just as he had ignored the old man.

The subway was now downtown. We were stopped at a station and the doors opened and closed several times before the conductor got on the p.a. and said, “Hey, the kid in the back of the train that’s messing around, if you get killed, I get three days off, which is fine by me, so keep it up.”

Bing Bong.

Watch the closing doors.

I caught bits and pieces of the home opener at Shea yesterday and was struck by the backdrop of the new park that is sitting just behind the outfield. Last season, the construction looked like something out of Waterworld, but now the facade of Citi Field looks almost complete. It was a surreal but arresting image, one that has me curious to get out to Shea and see it up close.

Neil deMause, a freelance writer and contributor to Baseball Prospectus, has been following the construction of the two new stadiums in New York. I haven’t been paying close attention to the dollars and cents of it all, but here are three pieces by deMause that detail what’s what ( “>two and three). deMause is unabashedly critical of the financing of both parks, which again brings to mind Robert Lipsyte’s SI story about the rennovation of the old Yankee Stadium, “A Diamond in the Ashes” (April, 1976):

Myles Jackson, a lineman on Michigan’s 1951 Rose Bowl team, was not born in the Bronx, as Abrams and Garelik and I were, but he lives there now, a block from Yankee Stadium. Four years ago, rebuilding himself after a business failure, he found an inexpensive apartment in the neighborhood, which is basically commercial and industrial. The Bronx Terminal Market is nearby, and the Bronx County Courthouse stands on the highest hill.

Sometimes Jackson spent a dollar to sit in the bleachers. I have done that, too, and it can be a soothing place, as public or private as one might need it to be, a sun deck, a gambling casino, a patio from which to see green, a tree house of old August fantasies.

And sometimes Jackson went to jog in Macombs Dam Park, which includes a football field ringed with a cinder track that lies literally in the shadow of the Stadium. The track was poorly maintained by the city; it was often unusable. When the Stadium was closed for renovation after the 1973 baseball season and the little park deteriorated even more, Jackson became angry enough to found a local organization called the Committee to Save Macombs Dam Park.

“Yankee Stadium is a symbol of the value system by which this city, this country, bases its decisions,” he says. “They can spend all that money for a stadium, but when it comes to a little more for a recreational facility that will really enhance the quality of life through sports, there’s just nothing left.”

But symbols and chemistry are the name of the game, whether your city is New York or someplace else, whether your game is baseball or some other sport. The “new” Yankee Stadium is not the all-weather, all-purpose facility New York needs. But as an example of the state of the art of cosmetic architecture, it is a handsome improvement. When I take my son to his first major league game, it will be in a brighter, airier, more comfortable ball park. The pillars that obscured the view of too many of the old 65,000 seats are gone, replaced by a steel cable-counterweight system of the type used to support suspension bridges. Gone will be that chilling dankness of Giant football Sunday afternoons, when the pillars cast late-fall shadows on the seats behind them. Of course, gone, too, are the Giants (to New Jersey), and gone are 11,000 seats, a million baseball seats per season.

…Perhaps the most luxurious new appointments are the 19 private lounges, complete with televisions, wet bars and bathrooms, that open onto 14—and in two cases, 30—reserved seats in the second deck behind home plate. The larger lounges go for $30,000 per season, the others for $19,000. The first was rented by the Yankees’ principal owner, George Steinbrenner III, recently returned to active participation after his suspension from baseball following his felony conviction for illegal Presidential campaign contributions.

Ironically, one of Steinbrenner’s first public actions since his comeback was the edict last month that in the interest of “order and discipline” players may not wear beards or long hair. “I want to develop pride in the players as Yankees,” Steinbrenner explained.

Yankee Pride costs a pretty penny. And it ain’t so cheap out in Queens neither.