As hard as it is to believe, the Yankees have just one more homestand left in 2007. Only seven games lie between the Yankees and the end of their 81-game home schedule.
We can wax poetic as much as we want about the end of the season and the tight race for a spot in October. But for the Yankees, business is booming. For the seventh year in a row, the Yankees are going to break their single-season attendance record. And they owe it all to Alex Rodriguez.
News has been scant about the Yankee Stadium construction. While my flickr photoset of the construction shows the glacial pace of building a stadium, we haven’t really had confirmation that new Yankee Stadium is, as I half-guessed earlier this month, well behind schedule.
That is, we hadn’t had confirmation until this morning. As The New York Sun notes, construction on Yankee Stadium is three months behind schedule in some places, according to people working on the site. The Sun reports:
On the other side of town, at the new Yankee Stadium, the heavy metal extending skyward, toward the baseball gods, is less visible. The concrete façade that will form the exterior of the stadium is constructed behind home plate, and workers are expanding it along both base lines. However, it extends just a short distance toward left and right field, and the steel framework for the upper deck is constructed only in the area behind home plate.
An ironworker who was working at the stadium this weekend and did not give his name said the construction of the concrete façade is three months behind schedule. He also said the portion of façade he was working on yesterday was supposed to be up by April.
The Yankees organization refused to participate in this article. A spokeswoman for the Yankees, Alice McGillion, denied that the concrete façade is behind schedule. “We are not behind. Absolutely not,” she said. “We are different than the Mets. We are not following the Mets’ way of doing things. We are doing it our own way.”
Well, if you take a look at the state of CitiField and the state of the new Yankee Stadium, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that Yankee Stadium is behind schedule. I was at Shea this past weekend, and the stadium there is much further along than the $1.2 billion behemoth in the Bronx. I’m sure the Yanks will get the stadium open in time for Opening Day 2009, but the clock is ticking.
In other stadium news, the city is having problems finding someone to run the parking garages. New York has come under fire from anti-public funding advocates for doling out $70 million to the garages around the stadium. News that the latest developers may default on another taxpayer-funded project may rankle more than a few residents.
It’s never a slow day in Yankee world. Is Kyle still on the team too?
I’m no fan of the New Yankee Stadium. While I understand the economics behind the Yanks’ desire for a new stadium, I don’t see the problem with Yankee Stadium.
I know I’m not alone, but Yankee fans have been underwhelmingly quiet about the new stadium. There were no protests to speak of, and the most vocal advocacy groups fighting the stadium were those rightly concerned with the loss of valuable park land in the South Bronx. The Yankees wanted their new stadium, and they will get one that will look just the one in Philadelphia which looks just like the one in San Diego which looks just like the one in Milwaukee and so on.
So the team will get its new playground, but we fans will get a giant surprise: The best seats in the house won’t be there anymore.
Taken from the street and at various points along the left field rotunda, you can check out the slide show here.
Every seventh inning at Yankee Stadium since September 18, 2001, Kate Smith (or Ronan Tynan) belts out “God Bless America.” Before the performance (or recording), Bob Sheppard urges us to “remember the servicemen and women who have lost their lives defending our freedom and our way of life.”
For a while after Sept. 11, all Major League Baseball teams were observing a moment of silence and playing this song. But now, five and a half years after the attacks, the moment of silence seems to have dwindled down to a half-second of silence, and “God Bless America” at Yankee Stadium – the only stadium at which it is performed on a daily basis – is raising more than a few eyebrows, as The New York Times noted yesterday. The Yankee Stadium ushers, it seems, chain in the fans and glare at folks who dare to move during the song.
Seconds before “The Star-Spangled Banner†and “God Bless America†are played, police officers, security guards and ushers turn their backs to the American flag in center field, stare at fans moving through the stands and ask them to stop. Across the stadium’s lower section, ushers stand every 20 feet to block the main aisle with chains…
Howard J. Rubenstein, the spokesman for the Yankees’ principal owner, George Steinbrenner, said the policy was an expression of patriotism. “Mr. Steinbrenner wanted to do all games to remind the fans about how important it is to honor our nation, our service members, those that died on Sept. 11 and those fighting for our nation,†Rubenstein said in a telephone interview.
Among the sports world on the Internet, Will Leitch at Deadspin covered this story. He noted how bad the song is, how Irving Berlin himself grew to hate it, and how enforced patriotism on behalf of the Yankees is just tacky. Over at Fark, that site of high-brow Internet culture, the Farkers had a field day with it as well.
But none of the Yankee bloggers have tackled this issue. Why? Because we hate to mix baseball and politics. We all get along because we all love the Yankees. We don’t want to know if we agree with George W. Bush’s foreign disaster policy. We don’t want to see the Yankee blogosphere devolve into a blue state-red state battle. It’s bad enough we have to deal with Red Sox trolls; we’re not going to get embroiled in the Michelle Malkin-Daily Kos wars as well.
I, however, want to break that silence. In my opinion – and in this piece I speak for me and me alone – it’s time for the Yanks to give Kate Smith and Ronan Tynan a break. We know the Yankees, and every other baseball club, are patriotic. We know the Yankees played a major role in lifting New York’s spirits in the fall of 2001 (even if those nasty Diamondbacks decided to rain on our parade).
But we also know that we are involved in a war in Iraq that shouldn’t have been part of the War on Terror. We also know that President Bush has very little support in the New York area and is suffering through a time in his presidency during which 28 percent of the nation approves of his handling of the job.
We all want to see our troops fighting overseas return home safely, and none of us want another terrorist attack on our soil. But do we really need “God Bless America” at every baseball game? Someone tell the Yankees: This is baseball. Leave the patriotism for some other time.
Update: A few astute commenters have noted that my argument falls back too much on politics and not enough on what the Yankees are doing. My point in mentioning Bush’s approval rating is to say that many people are uncomfortable with the way in which the Yankees promote George Steinbrenner’s ideas of patriotism. While many others agree with it, why not just leave it out all together and let each of us acknowledge our support for America on our own terms?