Warming up the Hot Stove to deal with the chilly weather …

• The Post’s George King reports that Mike Mussina’s decision on retirement will probably come shortly, as his agent will be meeting with him at the end of this week.
• King also reports that Arn Tellem, the agent for both Mussina and Jason Giambi, has mentioned that Giambi would like to be a Yankee in ’09, if the club wants him back.
• Newsday’s Ken Davidoff opines that the Yankees are more concerned with landing a top-flight pitcher than securing Mark Teixeira. Davidoff also reports on some AFL reviews of Yankee prospects.
• SI.COM has a pretty light-hearted interview with Derek Jeter. A few questions on how it feels to be out of the playoffs and other baseball issues. A lot of questions regarding his love life, his political affiliation and his preference in video games.
• NY Post blogger Tim Bontemps gives us an update on how some of our guys are doing in the Arizona Fall League. Juan Miranda is tied for second in doubles (six), tied for third in triples (two), is seventh in slugging percentage (.643) and is seventh in OPS (1.071).
• BP.COM has heard that the Brewers are leaning towards Ken Macha as their new manager, and that Willie Randolph will probably be heading to Colorado as a bench coach.
• Happy 26th birthday to reliever Jonathan Albaladejo. A happy 46th birthday to Danny Tartabull and a happy 67th birthday to Jim Ray Hart.
• On this date in 2001, President Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Game Three of the World Series. He was wearing a New York Fire Department windbreaker in honor of the heroes of the September 11th attacks.

By John C. McGinley (as told to Alex Belth)

I’m spit-balling with you but my favorite memories of Yankee Stadium came from a period of time when everyone I knew was an unemployed actor. I’m from New York originally. I was born in St Vincent’s in the Village and lived in Peter Stuyvesant Town until I was ten. Then my parents moved to the suburbs in Jersey but later I went to NYU and then lived on Perry and Bleecker for close to twenty years before I finally came out here in ’91. I got out of NYC to 84 and for the next five years, everyone I knew was unemployed actors. You’d get an off-Broadway play, or a day job on a soap, but mostly it was a grind, it was a struggle.

I loved to go up to the Bronx on an afternoon and catch a game. I’d go up to a day game at 161 and find all the other unemployed actors. Some guys would go to Shea but I never rooted for the Mets until Willie became their manager a few years ago and then I loved them.

The Yankees were terrible then. It wasn’t like today, getting a ticket was no sweat even if you were dead broke. Seats weren’t hard to come by. If a scalper was eating a scalper ticket sandwich two innings into the game, you could get it on the cheap. The scalper would have to eat it by that time. So we’d start up in the cheap seats and then move down. Most of us brought our own booze in with us, everybody brought what they needed. There would only be something like 12,000 people in the Stadium on a weekday afternoon. The ushers would let you down by the dugout because they were unemployed actors too.

The one thing that was understood was that nobody asked each other what they were doing. Cause the answer was, you’re doing nothing. You’re going to a Yankee game cause the phone’s not ringing. There were no cell phones in those days so guys would get up during the game and go use a payphone to call their machine to see if anyone on the planet would give them a job. And then you’d go back and watch the game for three hours and get lost in it and be happy.

We’d bust each other’s humps and argue and see who could memorize the most statistics. Tommy Sizemore had a photographic memory that was not dissimilar to Bob Costas’s ability to recall stats and facts. I was so pathetic I’d bring Roger Angell books up. I read his stuff in the New Yorker and his collections. Halberstam’s writing in the Summer of ’49 and especially The Teammates. I’m a sucker for baseball writing because the game lends itself to poetic prose. Some people think it’s too much but I think it’s great. So we’d talk about baseball and be having a good time.

I loved Yankee Stadium because of the colors and the smells and the potential for anything to happen in the bottom of the ninth. Baseball dictates that you can always come back and even in those years when the team was awful anything could happen. It was the perfect place to be for a young, unemployed actor. Things just seemed unlimited. Day games are from God. They are the greatest.

John C. McGinley plays Dr. Perry Cox on NBC’s Scrubs.

My wife Emily and I painted our apartment a few months back.  When we got to the bedroom, we chose a pale green.  “Green is a tricky color,” my mother said, and sure enough when we stared slapping it on the walls, we realized we had made a mistake. 

Lesson: Never buy a color called “Impetuous.”  So we tried another shade of green, which we liked…until the sun went down and our room turned into something out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. 

Wait til we put the pictures back, then it will look better.  Emily gave in.  The thought of re-painting was worse than living in a Fun House.  And eventually, with the pictures back on the wall, it did start to feel like home. 

The new site here doesn’t feel like home yet.  It has that new car vibe.  The technology is new, there are two new contributors, and a bunch of issues to address–the archives, the comment section, the links.  It has been overwhelming.  Exciting, but strange and new. 

I’m amped about where we are headed.  I just wanted to let you know, that I empathize with some of your reactions to the change and appreciate all of the feedback you’ve provided.  It’s going to take a minute, and things will continue to be tweaked over the next couple of months, but we’re working on it, and you aren’t alone in getting used to the new digs. 

Thanks for coming back.

Happy Humpday … here now the news!

• MLB.COM’s Anthony DiComo has some big news from the mouth of Brian Cashman:

1. Chien-Ming Wang got a thumbs up from the doctors after a pain-free bullpen session Monday.
2. He wouldn’t comment on whether the Yanks would discipline Joba Chamberlain for his recent DUI incident.
3. He isn’t counting on Mussina returning for 2009, at least at this point.

• ESPN reports that Willie Randolph denied a report stating he was interested in a coaching job with the Nats. Randolph is being considered for the managerial position in Milwaukee. (Thanks to Baseball Musings for the link)
• USA Today has a piece penned by Gary Thorne detailing the issue of tax-exempt bonds being used to finance new stadiums (Mets, Yanks, Nets). It is noted that teams are getting “interest-free loans” through the issuance of tax-exempt federal bonds for construction of the stadiums and allowing them to pay them back in place of taxes. However, as of Friday, the IRS revised their regulations to prevent future deals where tax-free bonds could be used in this manner to avoid taxes.
• Over at SI.COM, Jon Heyman has some tasty Yankee tidbits:

1. If you believe Jimmy Rollins (a good friend of C.C. Sabathia), the Yankees will end up the winner of the Sabathia Sweepstakes.
2. Matt Holliday intrigues the Yanks, but they are wary of his home/road splits.
3. One of the reasons Brian Cashman stayed with the Bombers was because Pat Gillick warned him to avoid the Mariners opening at all costs.

• Happy 33rd birthday to former Yankee (and Banter punchline) Karim Garcia. Also, a happy 49th b-day to the cannon-armed (and once traded for Banter fave Al Leiter) Jesse Barfield.

Mike Mussina hasn’t told the Yankees yet if he wants to play next year. At least, no one’s telling if he has. Baseball puts a moratorium on such announcements during the World Series (even if Scott Boras doesn’t comply), but rumor has it he’s leaning toward retirement. I, for one, would love to have Mussina come back for a variety of reasons stretching from his actual performance, to his influence on the Yankees’ young starters, to the likely brevity of his contract, to my own selfish need to hear some legitimately introspective and wickedly sarcastic postgame comments every five days.

Unfortunately, rumor has Mussina leaning in the other direction. Indeed, at the conclusion of Living on the Black, John Feinstein’s plodding account of Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine’s 2007 seasons, Mussina, speaking at the conclusion of his rough 2007 season, sounds convinced that 2008 would be his last year:

“I’m not going to be one of these players who announces his retirement five different times. But right now, I don’t see myself pitching after this year. I’m not going to be close enough to three hundred [wins], even if I have a good year, that I’m going to want to come back for at least two more years and, realistically, three more years.

“In 2006, I pitched about as well as I could have hoped to pitch, and I won fifteen games. If I win fifteen games a year–stay healthy, pitch well, all of that–for the next three years, I would still be five wins short of three hundred, and I’d be forty-two years old. What’s more, my older son will be a teenager by then, and my younger one is only a few years behind. I don’t want to come home just when they’re saying, ‘See ya, Dad.’

“I’ve had a good career. I’m lucky to be in a position that whenever I retire, I don’t have to do anything. I can pick and choose what I want to do or what I don’t want to do. If I have a great year, that might make it harder to walk away. But my plan right now is to walk away, and when the calls come the next spring from teams desperate for pitching, my answer–even if I’m tempted–will be no.”

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By Will Leitch

(Writer’s Note: I wrote this piece in October 2003, right after Aaron Boone hit his epic home run to briefly stave off the impending Red Sox juggernaut. Five years later, I’m a little embarrassed by it. It betrays a New York newbie’s naivete and dopey slack-jawedness about this strange new city in which he found himself. But I still thought about this story’s Jerry every time I went to Yankee Stadium, and, all told, I still think about him a little every time I ever go to a game anywhere.)

Thanks to the glory of blind Internet luck, I scored tickets to Game 6 of the American League Championship Series, for the blood feud between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. My seats were in the right field bleachers, notoriously the most profane, obnoxious and uproarious section in Yankee Stadium, probably in all of baseball.

Manhattan interlopers like myself, and outsiders who only know what they see on HBO, have a distorted view of what the people of New York City are like. They see glammed up urbanites in high heels and Prada sunglasses, sipping martinis and staying out until 4 a.m. They see artists, they see writers, they see stockbrokers, they see the fast living, non-stop, run run run lifestyle, the one that embodies Manhattan, the one that makes everyone want to come here, and they think that’s what life is like in New York. And for a certain, tiny-but-endlessly-self-promotional section of the population, I suppose it is.

But the real New York can be found in right field of the Yankee Stadium bleachers.

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Game 5 of the Series may have been suspended, but news about the Yankees never sleeps. Here’s today’s line-up:

• Over at ESPN’s Page 2, writer Jeff Pearlman catches up with 1998 World Series MVP Scott Brosius, who is now a very contented baseball coach at his alma mater, Linfield College.
• New York Post blogger Tim Bontemps reports on Baseball America’s ranking of the top 20 prospects at each level/league of the minors, and where any future Mets and Yanks show up. Brett Gardner was the only local to crack the Triple-A level top 20, at number 19 in the International League.
• MLB.COM reports that the late Catfish Hunter was remembered at the annual Lou Gehrig Sports Award benefit in New York last night. Graig Nettles and Tommy John were in attendance to support the cause of ALS research. Chris Chambliss received an award, but was unable to attend due to an illness in the family.
• The NY Times has an article on a one-credit research seminar on the topic of Yankee Stadium, being offered at Rutgers University. Topics of research include the hero in American culture, the plusses and minuses of urban development, and the relationship between public finance and private enterprise.

til tomorrow …

With the help of the various scorecards and ticket stubs I’ve saved over the years, I’ve been able to list roughly 127 games that I’ve attended at Yankee Stadium over the last 20 years. From among all those games, no single memory stands out any more than any single memory stands out from the house I grew up in, or the schools I’ve attended. Yankee Stadium was not so much a landmark that I visited, but a setting for a part of my life. It’s where I grew up as a baseball fan. It’s where I learned to keep score. Where my fandom was forged, challenged, and rewarded. My memory of the Stadium is thus assembled from a large collection of moments. Moments which made up my life as a baseball fan over the last 20 years. What follows is an associative trip through those moments.

The first baseball game I ever went to wasn’t at Yankee Stadium, but at Philadelphia’s old multi-purpose concrete donut, Veteran’s Stadium. Though I knew the Yankees were my team, one I inherited from my grandfathers on both sides of my family, men who remembered Babe Ruth and everything since, I was only getting my feet wet as a baseball fan in the summer of 1986 in the wake of my parents’ separation. Prior to that, my fandom was devoted primarily to music and countless hours of MTV. The Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” became something of a gateway drug to professional sports for me in late 1985, and Super Bowl XX was the first sporting event I watched from start to finish. That summer, the Mets were the hip young team that captured the attention of the tri-state area, and my dad took me on a bus trip organized by his office to see the Mets play the Phillies at the Vet. Despite the artificial turf and the fact that the Mets, who could have clinched the NL East that night, lost, I was hooked. Dad took me on another work trip to see the Mets at the Vet the following summer. By then I had sunk my teeth into the sport, collecting baseball cards, pouring over the statistics, and redirecting my attention to the team I had rightly inherited, the Yankees.

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Howdy! Here is what’s going on in Yankeeland today.

River Avenue Blues takes a crack at the off-season plans for the Yankees, and sees an inevitable push to sign Teixeira.

Over at the Daily News, George King writes that A.J. Burnett may be interested in signing with the Yanks if he opts out of the remainder of his deal with the Blue Jays.

MLB.COM’s Lisa Winston reports that the Trenton Thunder have been awarded the 2008 Minor League Baseball Yearly Award as the top Double-A organization.

Chien-ming Wang was honored as one of the ten most outstanding young men and women in Taiwan for 2008, reports the Taiwan News.

U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner suggests that the City sell off its luxury boxes at the Mets and Yankees new Stadiums as part of the plan to balance the budget, mentions the Daily News.

That’s all for now.

By Steven Goldman

I don’t know if this is my warmest memory of Yankee Stadium. Somehow my memories of the ballpark are more vivid than warm. There’s not a lot of romance attached to it. Maybe that’s because in the games I have attended as a fan, in my pre-professional days, I’ve seen a disproportionate number of losses. This is true even of the good years. Resultantly, my inventory of memories stretching back to the 1970s mostly shows visitors like Paul Molitor, Kirby Puckett, and George Brett doing mean things to the Yankees, and mediocre starters like Neil Allen and Joe Niekro doing their desultory best not to lose too badly. Even the things that are vivid involve losses. I was at the 1998 playoff game against the Indians where Chuck Knoblauch failed to pursue a ball that was sitting on the ground right next to him because he was arguing with the umpire, while Enrique Wilson tore around the bases with what proved to be the winning run. It was amazing to hear 40,000 people shouting, "Throw the f**king ball!" in near unison.

Some of my most vivid memories involve personal embarrassment or shame. The 1988 Old Timer’s Day game is fixed in my mind not only because of the grand slam that the great Jose Cruz pinch hit against the White Sox, the last home run of his career and his only as a Yankee, but because at almost that same moment my car was being stolen. I was 17; it was the first time I had driven to the ballpark. PS: despite the grand slam, the Yankees lost.

Going back still further, I can remember one of my first trips to the Stadium, if not the first, when I was about five years old. On our way into the building, I had seen a little toy horn that one of the vendors was selling. It was nothing more than a blue tube of plastic with a trumpet-shaped bell at the end. I was, in my childish way, very excited to have it, but as we entered the Stadium, a security guard saw the horn and started screaming at me. "What is that thing? You can’t bring that in here!" My parents intervened and the guy relented. I was allowed to bring it in, but with a warning: "Don’t make ANY noise with that thing!" For the rest of the game I felt scared, as if I was being watched, as if one wrong move would get us thrown out. I remember nothing about the actual contest, just the powerful feelings of mortification that blotted out all else. I imagine the Yankees lost.

Far more recently, during my professional years, I passed out in the Yankees clubhouse (in front of Tanyon Sturtze’s locker—he brought me a chair) and had to be carried out on a stretcher after Gene Monahan administered smelling salts. Thus I have experienced Stadium-based mortification both as a very young child and as an adult. It only remains for me to reap some kind of extreme embarrassment in old age; perhaps I’ll soil myself while interviewing Derek Jeter, Jr. at Stadium II.

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By Chris DeRosa

A Goodbye in Eight Games

23 May: Sea 2 @ NY 13

I’ve only made it to a handful of games in recent years, so with this season being the last chance, I bought a seven-game package and distributed one of each pair of tickets to my family as Christmas presents. My dad and I got a good one to start it off. Andy Pettitte finished off hitters more efficiently than he usually does, and Matsui and Giambi had big games at the plate. Our seats were half-way up in right field, which afforded us a view of the new building. There is some comfort in the fact that it is literally across the street. When you go to new place, you’re still making the familiar trip.

The most memorable game that I saw with my dad when it was just the two of us was Old Timers’ Day, 1978. This game was a famous one in Yankee political history; they announced Billy Martin would return as manager—bizarrely, a year and a half later—and he got a deafening sustained ovation. We had an old used car at the time, and, getting onto the expressway on the way home, the engine burst into flames and we had to abandon it. There was a group of kids who saw it happen and broke into "Burn, baby, burn—disco inferno!"

19 June: SD 1 @ NY 2

A sunny Thursday afternoon game with my brother Ben, who is a Red Sox fan. As an exercise in nostalgic reverie, having the San Diego Padres as the visiting team is a bit jarring. Do the Tigers or Indians play ever here anymore? The Yankees announce the opposing lineup to the "Imperial March" from Star Wars, which by logic, should obviously be our theme, if you want to embrace the Evil Empire conceit. "It’s because they have no sense of humor about themselves," says Ben.

Joba Chamberlain started for the Yanks and held San Diego’s minor league lineup in check, striking out nine. In the second, he loaded the bases with no outs, but then he unclogged the inning with a strikeout, a tag out at home from a ball that squirted away from the catcher, and another strikeout. Chamberlain came out for the sixth, struck out the first two guys, and then must have reached 100 pitches, and Girardi took him out. "Why don’t you just put him in a bubble?" said Ben.

30 June: Tex 2 @ NY 1

My friend Kevin, who is not a big fan, called me and told me he thought he’d better see Yankee Stadium before they tore it down. I went off the plan and splurged for tickets in Box 628, over third base in the upper deck, because I wanted to show him the sort of seats that will not exist in the new place. He was surprised to learn that Yankee Stadium is freshly painted, made of concrete, and only mildly pungent. He was under the impression that he was going to see some venerable old ballpark with rickety wooden planks and peeling paint.

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By Jacob Luft

I was lucky as a kid in that my parents used to let me tag along on business trips. Oftentimes that meant New York City, though it could also be Chicago or D.C.. On one such trip to the Big Apple, I remember taking in the view atop the Empire State Building, looking west across the Hudson River and asking my dad, “What’s that over there?”

“Oh,” he replied, “that’s just New Jersey.”

(Little did he know he was talking to a future bridge-and-tunnel boy and proud resident of West Orange, N.J.!)

If mom and dad didn’t have time to take me out to see the sights themselves, they would leave me with my great aunt or some other family friend. Funny thing, though: I can’t recall ever being consulted on the destination. I was at the grownups’ mercy of what they considered to be a good time for a kid. That changed one day — I don’t remember the year, sometime in the mid-1980s — when my mom got in touch with an old friend of hers from the old country (Nicaragua) who volunteered to watch me for the day.

Upon picking me up at the hotel he asked, “Where do you want to go kid?”

That was my cue.

“Yankee Stadium.”

It was the dead of winter. I had heard the newsman on the TV say it would be in the teens with minus-7 wind chill. Suffice it to say, there was no baseball scheduled on this day. Don Mattingly was on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean bashing coconuts. He wasn’t bashing baseballs at the Stadium.

“Uh, you know it’s not open right?”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I just want to see it.”

“OK let’s go.”

He was kind enough to leave some frost on his windshield that morning for the benefit of a kid who had never seen snow, but it was more slush than anything at that point. Still, I was duly impressed. I recall crossing the river, heading toward the Bronx on the highway and seeing the big grey hulk of the Stadium rise up. He drove around in circles for a little while trying to afford me the best view possible. As many longtime Yankee fans have told me, the Stadium in the ’80s was drab and dreary, and that jibes with what I saw that day. From the outside it seemed a lifeless edifice, especially with heavy sleet providing all of 30 feet of visibility. But hey, that was The House That Ruth Built, and Lou Gehrig played there and so did Joe D. and Mickey Mantle and all those guys on the baseball cards I had back home in a shoebox. I was on Cloud 9 just being so near to hallowed ground for the first time.

Unable to gain access to the Stadium itself, we did what I considered to be the next best thing: We ate a McDonald’s a couple blocks away. Nothing like a Quarter Pounder, French Fries and a Coke to ease the sting. I remember the fries being extra salty, which went in perfect balance with the gritty neighborhood. And it wasn’t just any McDonald’s. It was a Yankee Stadium McDonald’s, with pictures of Gehrig and Ruth and other legends all over the wall. My pilgrimage felt complete.

“So,” my guide asked, “how about we go to the Statue of Liberty now?”

Jacob Luft is a senior editor at SI.com.

By Dick Lally

June 8, 1969: Mickey Mantle day. I grew up idolizing Mantle, and when he came back on the field to accept the adoration of a crowd that under appreciated his great skills for far too long, I must have set the Guinness Book record for most goose bumps in an afternoon.

We sat in box seats on the third base side, I was fourteen and the cheering was as dense as concrete, a baseball version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. I came back a month later for Old Timers’ Day and received the commemorative recording of the event as a keepsake. I had it for years until it was lost in a move.

During the regular game that day, my friend Patty and I went to the concession stand and found Mike Burke signing autographs. The Yankees president had that great head of grey hair which he wore stylish coiffed and nearly down to his shoulders. Patty called out, “You’re a hippy,” and Burke said, “That’s right. Want to hear me hear me sing ‘Purple Haze?,” an answer that completely charmed the crowd of teenagers massed around him.

Dick Lally is the author nineteen books, including nine on baseball.

By Neil deMause

Of the five hundred or so games I’ve seen at Yankee Stadium, a fair number would probably qualify as “historic”: The Pine Tar Game. The Jeffrey Maier Game. Don Mattingly’s first postseason appearance. Jimmy Leyritz’ game-winning 15th-inning homer in the 1995 ALDS, presaging his more famous game-winning 8th-inning homer in the World Series the following year. Game 6 of the 1996 World Series, which ended with Charlie Hayes’ catch in foul ground and Wade Boggs atop a police horse. Game 4 in 2001, which ended with Derek Jeter’s 10th inning “Mr. November” home run. Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, which ended with my friend David and I watching the final out on the TV in the bleachers concession stand, then turning on our heels and leaving before the Red Sox celebration could begin. No-hitters by Jim Abbott and Dwight Gooden (though I missed Dave Righetti’s July 4 no-no against Boston, along with most of the other 300,000 people who now claim to have been there).

Those, though, are all historic events – they’d be just as famed if they’d happened somewhere else. When I think of my two-plus decades as a Yankee Stadium denizen, I keep coming back to one weekend in 1985, which though historic in its own way, was mostly memorable for other reasons:

FRIDAY: It was the summer before my sophomore year in college, and rumors of a baseball strike were in the air, so I was determined to jam in as many ballgames as possible. The final weekend before the deadline was a four-game series against the White Sox – still then in those hideous horizontal-striped jerseys – so I set out to see them all.

I took my usual seat in Section 39 – the bleachers were general admission in those days, so I’d sit in whatever row was far enough back to give room to stretch out, but close enough to hear what Dave Winfield was saying if he made one of his excursions through the outfield fence gate to chat with fans during a pitching change. The game was instantly a seesaw battle, and went into the 7th inning deadlocked at three apiece.

Andre Robertson, the former phenom whose career was derailed in a car wreck on the West Side Highway, led off with a single, and was pinch-run for by rookie Bobby Meacham. Dale Berra, brought in that year to play for his dad (who lasted all of 16 games), reached on an error, bringing up Rickey Henderson. Henderson lined a ball toward Death Valley – then still a spacious 411 feet from home – and Meacham charged home, pausing only briefly to see if the ball would be caught. Berra, meanwhile, was running head-down, and was only a few steps behind Meacham as they approached home plate.

I had a perfect view of the relay throw from Ozzie Guillen to Carlton Fisk as it arrived, well before Meacham. Fisk grabbed the ball, lunged one way to tag Meacham, then the other way to tag Berra. A stunned, awed silence settled over the stadium.

The Yanks ended up losing in extra innings. It all seemed somehow appropriate for those years.

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So the Yankees wrapped up their organizational meetings yesterday and they have their offseason plan in place. According to SI.com’s Jon Heyman, the plan appears to be get everyone:

The Yankees’ top executives have decided to pursue many of the game’s premier free agents, chief among them starting pitchers CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Derek Lowe, and first baseman Mark Teixeira, among others, this winter. They will also will pursue Jake Peavy, the Padres’ Cy Young-winning starting pitcher who may be available via trade, and may take a look at top free-agent outfielder Manny Ramirez . . . The Yankees will also consider bringing back starting pitcher Andy Pettitte, who has told them he’d like to return. . . . The Yankees may also consider Brewers pitcher Ben Sheets as yet another free-agent alternative, but there are some concerns about his injury history. If Mike Mussina decides he want to keep pitching, the Yankees would be interested in him, as well.

All this really tells us is that they Yankees aren’t ruling anyone out and do plan to be big spenders this winter. So that’s good, but before you get yourselves in a tizzy trying to figure out who the Yankees can trade for 2007 NL Cy Young award winner Peavy, bear this in mind from Pete Abe:

Barry Axelrod, Peavy’s agent, made it clear this afternoon that his client wants to stay in the National League. “It’s where he’s comfortable,” Axelrod said. “He knows the hitters and he enjoys that aspect of the game himself.”

In other news, Chien-Ming Wang is throwing off a mound, the Yankees have stated their intent to return Joba Chamberlain to the rotation for 2009, and Phil Hughes is tearing up the hitters’ paradise that is the Arizona Fall League with the new cutter he showed in his late-season return. That’s all very encouraging and means the Yankees are really only likely to sign two, three tops of the six non-Peavy pitchers listed above, which includes Pettitte and Mussina.

If it were up to me, I’d stay away from Burnett and Sheets due to their Pavano-esque injury histories. Sheets averaged 134 2/3 innings from 2005 to 2007 and was unable to help the Brewers in the playoffs due to reoccurring elbow pain. Burnett had made 30 starts just once his his nine major league seasons prior to his walk year this year. Instead, I’d go after Sabathia (of course), Lowe, and Moose, with Pettitte as a backup option.

Lowe will be 36 in June, so he shouldn’t be offered much more than a two-year deal. If he wants more, the Yanks can let him go and sign Pettitte, who has said he won’t sign elsewhere and should take another one-year deal. Pettitte was awful down the stretch, but blamed his poor performance on a loss of stamina due to his failure to stick to his usual winter workout regimen as he wanted to stay out of sight during the fallout from the Mitchell Report. Mussina might want another two-year deal if he decides to return, as a return may mean a commitment to go for 300 wins (he’s at 270), but he earned it by reestablishing himself as the staff ace this season. Given the fact that Wang, Chamberlain, and Hughes are in their team-control years, as is everyone in the bullpen except for Mariano Rivera and Damaso Marte (if the Yankees decide to pick up his $6 million option), a pair of two-year deals for Moose and Lowe would be extremely affordable and leave plenty of payroll room for the Yankees to throw Johan Santana money at Sabathia. Of course, CC, a career .261 hitter who connected for two home runs this year, may also prefer to stay in the NL where he can hit, but if that’s the case, the Yanks can up their offers to Lowe and especially Mark Teixeira, the latter of whom is the free agent I most hope the Yankees will sign this winter.

By Jeff Pearlman

My family hated baseball.

That was the worst thing about growing up a sports fan at 24 Emerald Lane in Mahopac, N.Y. My mom could not care less about sports. My dad could not care less about sports. My brother could not care less about sports.

Me? I cared. Boy, did I care. My walls were lined with one poster after another—Rickey Henderson next to Wesley Walker next to George Foster next to Bernard King. My closets were stuffed—stuffed!—with baseball cards, 30 … 40 together, rubber-banded in ways that left Mario Soto and Dan Pasqua positioned in the most awkward of poses. Dozens of baseball caps lined up neatly behind my bed.

But nobody cared.

Then, one day, my dad asked if I had any interest in going to a Yankee game. It was 1985 and Rich Green, one of his employees at Herz Stewart & Co., had an extra ticket. "You guys both love baseball," Dad said. "He wants to take you."

I still remember walking into the stadium that first time. We sat along the third base line, and my posters had come to life. There was Ken Griffey, Sr., his hat tipped high atop the front of his Afro, stretching calves the size of large dogs. There was Henderson, the great base stealer, twitching his fingers into white batting gloves. There was Henry Cotto, uhm, well, yeah. Henry Cotto. The grass was as green as a 7-Up label, Bob Sheppherd’s voice even more God-like then the one I’d heard on TV all those times. My seat was made of a hard blue plastic, and as the innings passed I must have bounced up and down upon it, oh, 500 times. Like Victor Mata, I was just happy to be there.

I’ve been told a game was even played that day. I recall little of it, only that Dave Winfield made an amazing leaping catch into the rightfield stands and that Butch Wynegar started at catcher. Doesn’t matter, though. What sticks with me is the magic of the day; the feeling of walking into a building and knowing love.

True love.

Jeff Pearlman is a writer for ESPN.com.

By Mark Feinsand

Since I started covering the Yankees in 2001, I have witnessed some of the most memorable moments in history at Yankee Stadium. Not just Yankees history or Yankee Stadium history, but baseball history.

The Aaron Boone home run. The Red Sox ALCS comeback. Roger Clemens’ 300th win. Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius hitting dramatic homers in the bottom of the ninth on consecutive nights in the 2001 World Series.

But when I was asked what moment stands out to me from my time as a fan (1978-2000), there was one that jumped to mind immediately.

It was Tuesday, October 17, and the Yankees were trying to close out the Mariners in Game 6 of the ALCS. The Mets had closed out the Cardinals in the ALCS the night before, and a win over Seattle would send the Yanks into the first true Subway Series between the crosstown rivals.

As a kid growing up in New York in the ’80s, I had many more friends that were Mets fans than Yankees fans, since the 1986 Mets captivated the city and seemed to turn most 10-12 year olds into Mets fans. But with a father who grew up in the Bronx, I wasn’t about to be a convert (He did help me become a San Francisco Giants fan, however, having moved to the Bay Area in 1989, but that’s another story). A World Series between the Yankees and Mets would be the most memorable baseball week in my lifetime.

I was at the game with my buddy Matt Sadofsky, his sister, Janna, and their father, Lenny. Sadofsky and I were fraternity brothers at Boston University, and as Yankees fans living in Boston, we had become good friends while fending off the Sox fans that surrounded us.

We watched the ALDS games at a sports bar in 1995 (that was the year of the Baseball Network, so the Red Sox series against the Indians was on local TV, forcing us to spend what little money we had to watch at the Sports Depot) and sped home in about 38 seconds to watch Jim Leyritz hit his homer after the manager told us they were closing up.

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By Hank Waddles

I have only been to Yankee Stadium three times, but each visit holds a significant spot in my memories. My first visit changed my life. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and geography told me to root for the Tigers until at the age of seven in the summer of 1977 I convinced my parents to spend one day of our New York City vacation at Yankee Stadium. Catfish Hunter started the game, Chris Chambliss launched a late pinch-hit home run to bring the Yanks from behind, and Sparky Lyle got the win in relief. My strongest memory from that afternoon, though, is of a play that wasn’t made. Graig Nettles lunged into the stands in pursuit of a foul pop-up, and I was confused when the crowd cheered for him even though he hadn’t been able to make the grab. “They’re cheering because he gave it his all,” my mother explained. He gave it his all. To this day, whenever I hear that phrase I think of Graig Nettles.

My third visit was bittersweet. Last month my family and I flew across the country to New York from our home in California so that my children could one day say they had been to the original Yankee Stadium, the place where Ruth and Gehrig, Mantle and DiMaggio, Yogi and Whitey, Reggie and Thurman, Jeter and Rivera had all played. A-Rod homered, Jeter picked up four hits, Mike Mussina coasted to his sixteenth win, and everyone went home happy, but a little sad that we’d never visit again.

Neither of those games, as memorable as they were, measures up to the visit I made in August of 1997. A friend’s wedding brought me to the east coast, and as fate would have it, Don Mattingly Day was scheduled while I was in the area.

Mattingly, for me, was everything, a bright light in a dark time. The previous generation of Yankee fans had Bobby Murcer to guide them through the wilderness, but Mattingly was better; in my teenage mind, he was legendary. I was fourteen years old when he outlasted Dave Winfield for the American League batting title, and I remember tracking each of his hits in a computer program I’d written. (This was long before the instant gratification of the internet, and I couldn’t wait for the stats in the Sunday sports section.) A few years later, just before he was robbed of what should’ve been his second MVP award, I announced to my mom that I would one day name my son after him. (As it happened, I didn’t, but I was wearing a Yankee jersey in the delivery room when my son Henry was born.) Even when I got to college I mirrored Mattingly’s batting stance during IM softball games, crouching low and turning my front toe towards home plate.

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By Tyler Kepner

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written and submitted before the end of the regular season…]

My seat in the press box is Row 1, Seat 1. I have sat there for seven seasons as the Yankees’ beat writer for the New York Times. The Star-Ledger is to my right, and the visiting television booth is to my left.

The color analyst sits on the right side of that booth, so I am separated from him by a glass panel. You can’t really talk unless you lean out the front of the box, but you can communicate by signals. Was that pitch a slider or a curve? A changeup or a splitter? You make the universal hand motions for the pitch, and you get your answer.

Most of the analysts wear a World Series ring, it seems. Bert Blyleven of the Twins wears his 1987 ring. (I’ve never seen his ’79 model, from the Pirates.) Rod Allen of the Tigers wears his 1984 ring, Rex Hudler of the Angels wears his 2002 ring, and so on.

When Ron Fairly worked for the Mariners, he wore a 1989 Giants N.L. champs ring, from his days in the booth in San Francisco. I always wondered what happened to the three rings he won as a player with the Dodgers.

The broadcasters have their quirks. Hudler always holds onto a baseball when he calls a game. He calls it his pacifier. Jerry Remy of the Red Sox does every game with a little stuffed “Wally The Green Monster” on the desk in front of him. Nobody keeps more meticulous notes than Blyleven.

Sometimes I’ll look up the broadcasters’ career stats on my laptop, careful to tilt the screen away, in case they catch a glance. I remember learning that Candy Maldonado (he wears a ’92 Blue Jays ring) pinch-hit in the ninth inning of the game that made me happier than any sporting event ever – the final game of the 1983 N.L.C.S., when the Phillies won the pennant. (I was 8. Candy struck out.)

I’ll miss stuff like that when the Yankees move. Maybe I’ll have the seat next to the visiting broadcasters again, but I doubt it. And I doubt I’ll walk down the ramps after night games, instead of taking the elevator.

The ramps from the loge level to the street remind me of how old the place really is – they’re impossibly cramped, with low ceilings, thick black bars on the sides, and what I assume to be the original structural bolts, painted over many times. It’s better to walk the ramps when it’s empty, I suppose, late at night.

I remember covering the Angels in 1998, when a chunk of steel fell into the loge level seats down the left field line before a game at the Stadium that April. You knew then that the place was doomed, but it has stood for one more decade.

Now it has finished with a string of seasons where four million people packed in. The fans should be proud of that. The fortunes of the team rise and fall, but to the end, Yankee Stadium never lost its appeal.

Tyler Kepner is the Yankee beat writer for The New York Times.

By Jonah Keri

My first trip to Yankee Stadium was supposed to be my second trip. A last-minute bailout the first time delayed the inaugural expedition for 12 years.

The day was August 12, 1995, the summer after second year of college. Brian, Elan, Eric and I set out on a four-day baseball road trip down the East Coast, with the first stop in the Bronx.

It took a while. The drive from Montreal takes six hours. There was also a stop at Crabtree & Evelyn to buy this girl we were staying with a gift for her hospitality. (Sales clerk at the store, inquiring about our gift choice: “Is she…earthy?). When we finally arrived at the ballpark (one of the scam-job parking lots around the park, to be precise), we were zonked. Stepping out of the car, we felt the blast out of a muggy New York evening, complete with all the smells you come to expect from a quality borough on a hot summer night.

We were expecting a shrine, a living monument commemorating Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Meacham, all the Yankees greats. Instead, we got a zoo. Swarms of people everywhere, flitting around the periphery of this monstrous structure. We were told to pick up our tickets at Gate…something, we couldn’t remember. After 30 minutes of darting through the throng, shoving people aside and getting piss-off responses from fans and stadium workers alike, we finally found our ticket window. Made it to our seats in the bleachers just in time for first pitch.

Once again, it smelled. Awful. We were told that trash sometimes piled up under the bleachers, but we figured that was just an exaggeration. Um…no, it was not. Combined with the sweltering heat (89 degrees at game time), we were doing everything in our power to focus on the game, or beers…anything other than the sticky, stinky, squashed-in mess that was left field that night.

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