Backwards

"No one can give you courage. No one can thicken your skin. I will not fail so you can be comfortable. I will not lose because you can't win." -- Jason Robert Brown

I went out to pick up breakfast with my father this morning. As is the norm on a weekday, Bagel Works was packed with patrons, including one twentysomething man wearing a backwards Boston Red Sox cap. Never one to miss an opportunity to needle a fan of a team that sucked for 86 years, Dad locked eyes with the man and smirked.

"Your hat is on backwards," said Dad.

The man gave a pained sigh. "Yeah. They suck."

Dad blinked, said nothing. The man paid for his order and left.

Changes

"Though we may not know it now, things are never gonna be the same. Here on Second Avenue, I tip my old top hat to you. I hope you find somebody who will love you like I do... and our time is running out and we still have to say goodbye. Goodbye Philadelphia." -- Peter Cincotti

I have so many things going on in my life that I feel deserve blog entries of their own, but between a massively increased workload, a sorrowful goodbye, a cautious hello that turned into an angry goodbye, and an anticipated hello that never actually materialized, I'm too physically and emotionally drained to put pen to paper with any semblance of heart. I'll try though, and if any of these half-assed snippets spark my desire to write more, I'll expand upon them another day.

Oddly enough, my hellish recent existence began with the most relaxing five days I've spent in recent memory. I went upstate for Fourth of July weekend -- far enough upstate that my cell phone barely worked, internet access was nonexistent, and my pager was as good as a paperweight. For five days, I let people cook for me and clean for me, amused myself by reading, crocheting, and taking ten-mile aimless hikes through the woods, and talked nonsense until three in the morning with two of my oldest friends. I felt closer to nature and more appreciative of the beauty of life than I have in a long time.

Then I had a very long workweek. And a very long half of the next workweek. After my Nth fourteen-hour workday in a row, I went out with my cousin and had my pedicurist paint my toenails blue. (The color is called Dating a Royal, actually.) I haven't had blue toenails since I was about eight years old, and I'm not entirely sure I had them then, either.

I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the film version of my favorite J.K. Rowling novel, on Friday and again on Saturday. Friday's viewing was a muted early-morning affair with Rutila and Saturday's viewing was a raucous all-day spectacle with thirty of my college classmates (including Q, Charles, and Wink). To kill some of the three hours we spent waiting on line outside the IMAX theater, we patronized a farmer's market and loaded up on quick breads and fresh fruit. I bought a carton of red currants, and when I got home around midnight, I pulled a recipe out of my ass and used them to make Sunday morning breakfast.

Red Currant Mini Muffins

3/4 stick salted butter, softened
2 tbsp citrus-infused olive oil (or 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil and 1 tsp citrus zest)
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg + 1 egg white
1 tbsp baking powder
1 cup flour
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1 tbsp whole milk
1 cup red currants (or blueberries), stems removed

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat butter, olive oil, and sugar until fluffy, then beat in eggs and vanilla. Add baking powder and flour and mix until incorporated. Stir in red currants. Spoon into greased or lined miniature muffin trays; cups should be 3/4s full. Bake for 18 minutes or until muffin tops are browned. When muffins have cooled, remove from trays and arrange on a plate. Add milk to confectioner's sugar and stir until a thin glaze forms, adding more milk if necessary. Drizzle glaze over muffins and allow glaze to harden. Alternatively, you can dust the tops of the muffins with powdered sugar -- these are pretty tart so they'll need some sort of sugar on top.

Makes thirty miniature muffins. (This will also make a dozen regular muffins -- bake for about 25 minutes instead.)

Today, I went to New Yankee Stadium for my fourteenth Old Timers' Day, the once-a-year event where retired Yankees greats put on their old uniforms, line up on the field, reminisce about the good ol' days, then play a few innings for old time's sake. On Old Timers' Days back in the mid-1990s, my father used to point out the ballplayers of his youth -- Nettles and Gossage and Jackson and Dent -- and say to me, "Sooner than you realize, you'll be sitting here with your kid, Tino Martinez and Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera are going to be playing in the Old Timers' Game, and you're going to know how I feel right now." I scoffed for a decade, then the first two players from Yankees teams I watched as a child, Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, showed up on Old Timers' Day. Last year, David Wells, Paul O'Neill, and Tino Martinez took the field. This year, Chad Curtis, Charlie Hayes, and my precious, cherished, beloved Mike Mussina (who won 20 games for the Yankees just last year) joined the ranks of "old timers." I'm starting to realize what Dad meant more than a decade ago, though I can't pin down the emotion just yet. I have some time before Jeter and Rivera are up there, though, and I don't plan on facing my thoughts until that day comes.

The House That Ruth Did Not Build

"Then the night turned cold, colder than the moon. The stars were white as bones. The stadium was old -- older than the screams, older than the teams. There were three men down and the season lost and the tarpaulin was rolled upon the winter frost." -- Paul Simon

Last Saturday afternoon, I paid my first visit to the new ballpark where the New York Yankees play their home games. I can't verbally call it (and won't refer to it in print as) "Yankee Stadium," which should give you an idea of how I feel about the place.

That sounds a little cruel. The Yankees' new home is a beautiful -- no, downright stunning -- ballpark. Photos of Yankees legends are plastered everywhere, most notably in the Great Hall (where soaring thirty-foot high banners portray the greats in black-and-white on one side and color on the other). The fair portions of the field are the same dimesions, even down to the short porch in right. The exterior is resplendent with gold leaf and shining white limestone and cathedral windows and looks like Yankee Stadium did before its 1975 renovation. The facade crowns the seats instead of the scoreboard and Monument Park has been restored to center field, just as they looked in 1923. Most of the dirt was carted over from across the street, so today's Yankees technically play on the same soil that Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle did. The new ballpark is perfect, but nevertheless, it didn't feel right. I spent three hours sitting in a seat that's technically mine but felt nothing like my beloved Section 9, surrounded by forty thousand strong while a majestic deserted ballpark quietly rotted a few hundred feet away. I cheered and chanted and enjoyed the game, but I was always acutely aware that Yankee Stadium is supposed to sit on the opposite side of 161st Street.

The architects and designers of the new stadium tried VERY hard to pay homage to the history of the Yankees, but at best it all seems a bit cartoonish and at worst it feels like a slap in the face. To illustrate the former, consider that the foul territory has been cut in half to bring expensive seats closer to the diamond, the cathedral-esque exterior hides a shopping concourse, the gleaming white facade hangs over "cheap seats" that have been halved in quantity, and Monument Park is hidden under a corporate-branded sports bar.

I'll use a longer example to illustrate that slap in the face. When Thurman Munson, the famed catcher and former captain of the Yankees, died halfway through the 1979 season, none of his teammates could bring themselves to clean out and reassign his locker. It sat in the clubhouse untouched, looking exactly as it had the last time Munson hung up his jersey, for the remainder of that season... and the season after that and the season after that. For the next thirty years, Munson's locker was only disturbed for cleaning; the clubhouse was renovated around it, lockers were assigned and deserted and reassigned without heed to it, and subsequent Yankees captains were relocated to the locker next to Munson's. It was a private tribute made and maintained by those who shared a special bond with Munson, whether by friendship or by the ties of pinstripes. But when the Yankees moved across the street after the 2008 season, Munson's locker had to be moved as well.

The current captain of the Yankees dresses next to an empty locker before every home game, but it's not Munson's. The space adjacent to Derek Jeter's locker stands empty as a tribute to all lost legends... while Munson's locker stands upstairs in a museum, encased in glass, visible to fifty thousand people a day.

It's a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with the stadium itself. My Yankee Stadium, with its rickety frame and uncomfortable seats and peeling paint and quirks and nuances and undeniable baseball magic, has been replaced with a Stepford Wife fascimile and put on display for the world to gawk at. The Yankee Stadium I called home may not have had cathedral windows, but I worshipped there for fifteen years, poured hundreds of prayers into those walls, and emerged with just as many secrets and divine inclinations.

I'll get used to it eventually. I'll keep going to the games, and as my time spent in section 211 starts to approach my time spent in Section 9, I'll start to build a new set of memories to cherish and a new set of prayers to live by. But last Saturday, for the first time in my life, I sat in Yankee Stadium and felt homeless.

Black Armbands

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Yankee Stadium." -- Bob Sheppard

Whenever a Yankees legend dies, the team -- and its diehard fans -- wear black armbands to commemorate the loss. This would certainly be a black armband occasion if I still practiced the tradition, since the greatest legend of them all passed into eternal rest just a few minutes ago.

Baseball history was my religion for years, and rightly so, Yankee Stadium was my cathedral. However, unlike my attitude towards normal cathedrals, I'm more interested in the spirituality than the structure in this case. Sure, I'm attached to the architecture of the Stadium and the dimensions of the playing field and the quirks of the design, but the atmosphere, the uncanny sense of years past... they mean more to me than I can possibly describe. Every time I entered the Stadium and moved through one of the tunnels into daylight, into the open expanse of the field, I was always keenly aware that I'd happened upon something majestic.

You could say that I grew up on 161st Street and River Avenue in the South Bronx, in a blue plastic seat in Section 9 with so little leg room that I had to stand every time someone tried to walk past me. I first sat there on a warm day thirteen years ago; I was fitted for braces a few days beforehand and requested blue and white rubber bands to mark the occasion. I first realized that I needed glasses in that seat, when all of a sudden I had to squint to see the scoreboard. I experienced my very first PMS cramps while sitting there -- during the World Series, no less. A man hit on me for the first time in my life as I sat in that seat, and I tasted my first beer in that seat. I spent no fewer than ten birthdays there. I celebrated getting into my chosen high school there, wrote half of my college essay there, celebrated getting into my chosen college there, celebrated getting my first full-time job there.

And because I'd always arrive at the Stadium a good two hours before the first pitch to beat the traffic, I always had time to sit quietly, think about the great game, and enjoy the ambiance. Section 9 was my home for about fifteen games a season for thirteen years, and I've been lucky enough to witness a few pretty great moments from the last row -- Tino Martinez's grand slam in Game 1 of the '98 World Series, the clincher in the '99 Series when my favorite player, Mariano Rivera, was named MVP, ten consecutive Old Timer's Day ceremonies, the ceremonies to retire Don Mattingly's and Ron Guidry's numbers, Roger Clemens' 300th win, others I'm ashamed to have forgotten.

Thus, I am -- and always have been -- fiercely protective of Yankee Stadium. Sure, it's one thing to watch Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, and Johnny Damon prowl around the outfield, but to watch them with the knowledge that they're standing exactly where Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle once stood is something else entirely. (I've always maintained that the only way I'd ever agree with plans for a new Yankee Stadium is if the builders carted every square inch of dirt from the old field to the new one, just so the ghosts of yesteryear wouldn't feel misplaced.)

When rumors flew about moving the team to the West Side railyards back in '97, I took Mayor Giuliani's efforts as a personal affront and wrote a protest song to convey my feelings. (Yes, I was a peculiar eleven year-old.) My song borrowed the sentiments, the tune, and more than a few lyrics from Billy Joel's "Miami 2017," and because I wasn't an especially talented lyricist in the fifth grade, I'll spare you the first two-thirds of the song. I'll share the ending though, because, more than a decade later, I still feel the same sadness that sparked me to originally put these words to paper.

They made a tribute to the Legends and named the park for players past.
I knew it would not pay. Their home was blown away.
The magic ran out pretty fast.

You know those lights were bright in the Bronx, but that was so many years ago.
Before the game was ruled by money, before the death of Joe DiMaggio.

There are not many who remember; only a few of us survive
Who have the nerve to tell 'bout the way the rafters fell
And keep the history alive...