Sep 22 2008
Not ready to say Goodbye to The Stadium
The thing is I wasn’t going to get caught up in all the hoopla that surrounded moving across a street. I know that Yankee Stadium is a legendary, wondrous place but if the city could knock it down and bulldoze it, like it was nothing more than an old decrepit house, why should I care.
Yankee Stadium does have meaning to me. I would still consider myself a rather good fan of the team, when they make the playoffs I hang on to every pitch like it is the most important thing in the world, but when I was young I was like that every game. When they were winning in the late 1990s, I never missed a game but then after the loss in 2001 my cable provider didn’t carry the YES network for all of 2002. Team that with a quick exit in that year’s playoffs, and the spell was broken a bit by the time the Yes network premiered in April 2003.
So this year I was ready to be that crazed girl again but they just lost so badly and it seemed like over kill when every time I watched an event it was labeled “the last…” I wasn’t even watching the game last night. After prodding from my father I set the DVR to record but I was watching the Emmys. I didn’t care, they had turned on me and I was going to move on. The problem was after the Emmys ended, the DVR switched to the game and it was the last inning. It looked like all those World Series games that filled up my youth and when it ended, nobody left.
The players remained on the field, and Derek Jeter made a speech. Then there was Tino Martinez, in a suit but looking like he was ready to play. And there were clips of the old days when Girardi caught baseballs instead of flack. I’m not ready for it to be over. Yankees Stadium cannot have its last game (no matter how magical and beautiful it was) in September when all of it’s greatest times were October. I’m willing to get my heart broken by those pinstriped fools one more time and believe that they can actually pull of a World Series win this year, but they’ve got to hold up there end and once again pull of the unthinkable.
