the late Steve Gilliard (of News Blog fame)......

He didn't see the Yankees in the same light as you (he was a Mets fan, I think)

and to quote my favourite comedian....

-5.75,-4.05
"We're all fucked. It helps to remember that." --George Carlin

Jeff Pearlman has some interesting things to say about politics and baseball.

* Baseball, as a sport, is staffed by men who are conservative and generally come from humble (poor) backgrounds.
* Baseball players tend to be pro-life, pro-gun, and all drive Hummers and/or gas guzzling cars.
* The tragedy about baseball is that the players have opinions — they are pro-McCain, pro-war, pro-Bush but they don’t know why they hold these opinions. They just do.
* MLB players are held up as role models in our society; however, they are wealthy and empowered to speak to the media, but they are totally uninformed.
Source

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

I'm a New Yorker for many years though I've never been to a Yankee game. Last New York game I was at Duke Snyder hit two home runs off Don Drysdale. They were both great Dodgers though "The Duke of Flatbush" was on the Mets at the time. The stadium was the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played before they left for the west coast like the Dodgers. I've also seen baseball at Delormier Stadium in Montreal where Jackie Robinson first played in "white" baseball. Years later I saw Hank Aaron play at Jarry Park in Montreal, a barely bigger than minor league stadium but still far better than the huge coffin that is the Montreal Olympic stadium. It seated about 29k and was almost always filled to capacity. Then they moved to the Olympic hole and started trading away great players and Montreal got a rep for being a bad baseball town. Sort of like Long Island being a bad basketball area after the Nets sold Dr. J, Julius Irving. Anyway, getting off topic.

2001 was of course the year of 9-11 and the start of Rudy Giuliani's love affair with the day. I think he was at all the Yankee games that fall after 9-11, hogging the camera every chance he could. For a change, the Yankees were viewed as the Cinderella team. And they came from behind to take the lead in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series which was in Arizona .. ironically only to have Mariano Rivera blow the save, the game and the series.

- the teams and players, that is. Even a clusterfuck like The Bronx Zoo had some real ballplayers.

More than anything, I learned at a young age to detest (1) New Yawk sportwriters (hello, Dick Young!) and (2) New Yawk fans (especially expatriates and local frontrunners). After Steinbrenner bought the club I learned to detest him too.

Here in flyover country, we chortled as the once-fearsome Yankee lineup went to seed with such "stars" as Joe Pepitone, Tom Tresh, Clete Boyer, Roy White and Bobby Murcer. We snorted loudly at the drooling of writers like Young in the pages of The Sporting News, who picked the Bombers to win the pennant every year, even while the team struggled to best the .500 mark.

But then, we (my buddies and I) were in Cleveland, which hometown team had been the only club besides the Yankees to win the AL pennant between 1947 and 1958 but had since declined into sad-sackery unprecedented in the history of baseball (excepting always the St. Louis Browns, who don't count because they kicked AL ass for three decades after moving to Baltimore). Scoffing at the shadow Yankees and their deluded followers throughout the late sixties and early seventies was the best source of fun and comfort we had.

The Zoo years were annoying because of The Boss and The Kid and the constant storm of publicity over a team that never was great, a couple of World Series titles notwithstanding - not great in the sense of the Ruth/Gehrig/DiMaggio/Mantle/Berra/Ford dynasty, nor in the subsequent excellent and classy clubs of Joe Torre (produced by Gene Michael).

In my jaded view, the redemption of the Franchise in the Bronx came with Joe Torre, Derek Jeter, Tino Martinez, Paul O'Neill, Joe Girardi, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada et al. That crew has worn the pinstripes with honor, played the game The Right Way, and comported themselves with class, as Champions.

I did see one game at Yankee Stadium; it was in 1975 and ranks as one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. At that time, the city and the team were troubled, and the fans visited their frustration and insecurity upon the home team, the visiting team (the Tigers, on this occasion), each other, and out-of-towners. We left after the sixth inning.

Tines change though. Although I still consider Yankee Stadium fans to be the biggest assholes in the league, I hope to get to a game there this season. There is history and majesty to the old park, although much of its aura was lost to me when it was refurbished. The new park seems to have pretty much the same footprint, but living in one of the cities that was an early adapter of the "new/old" ballpark, I know what the most noticable difference will be: hundreds of loges and "premium" seats. The drunken louts will have to scramble for the cheaper seats, just as our drunken louts have had to in Cleveland.

The biggest difference will be the one that the players in town for the All-Star game are the last to experience: this is indeed the House That Ruth Built, the same turf trod by countless Yankee Hall-of-Famers and dozens of worthy opposing greats. Never mind how many clueless rookies have asked if their really were bodies buried under those monuments: Yankee Stadium is the Cathedral of baseball. Fenway and Wrigley will remain, for some unknown length of time, but those parks are chapels compared to that big ol' pile of concrete and steel at the 161st Street Station in the Bronx.

I will mourn its passing (but not as much as I did Tiger Stadium, Forbes Field and Crosley Field, which I also visited as a boy - thank you, Dad!).

_{Turn back to the Constitution - and READ it.}

I'm a life-long (not recent "Red Sox Nation" wannabe) Red Sox fan. I lived three blocks from Fenway Park for five years. I was three rows up along third base there when Ted Williams hit his last Fenway homer.

. . . and I'll miss Yankee Stadium somethin' fierce. I hate it that Fenway has seats on top of The Wall now, but it's a damn sight better than the plans they had to build a new Fenway next to the old one.

I only went to one game there in the Bronx, sat in the bleachers. They were playing the A's, thankfully, not the Sox. I saw four fights and got a beer or two thrown my way. Can't imagine what would have happened if I was rooting for Oakland.

Never had so much fun in my life. Hope Wrigley ain't next.

The science of baseball is no game

Physics has another high-speed particle to study: The baseball. Physicists are asking questions like: Why is an infield pop-up so hard to catch? Why does a knuckleball flutter?

And the answer lies in drag, spin, and especially all those little stitches that make a tiny vortex of air swirl in funny ways around the ball's surface.
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_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}