I wasn’t too upset about the Yankee Love Fest that was Fox’s coverage of OMG THE LAST ALL STAR GAME AT YANKEE STADIUM. I mean, yeah, it was completely over the top and so full of fake, sepia-toned wistfulness it would make Ken Burns retch.

But the months and months of hype leading up to it meant you knew it was gonna be like that. If you insisted on watching the All Star Game, knowing full well it was going to be 4 hours of Joe Buck bending over and spreading for the Pinstripe Bullet, you really have no right to complain about it.

I did wish, however, that more attention had been paid to the two following details.

1) Yankee Stadium hasn’t been condemned. It’s not about to turn into dust. It’s old and outdated, but the Yankees could continue to play there if they really wanted to. So essentially, this “celebration” of the last year at Yankee Stadium is really a celebration of the Yankees building a billion dollar monument to themselves–with more than half of that money coming from city bonds, while the team tries and hold New York over a barrel for even more public funds to complete it.

1a) Oh, and they destroyed one of the few public parks in their Bronx neighborhood in order to do it. The team insists that they’ll pay to replace it with another public park, but that new park will be located on the other side of the Deegan. So go fuck yourselves, local residents, we need that space for a Hard Rock Café!

2) When the history of Yankee Stadium is rehashed by nostalgia junkie writers, they inevitably bring up Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, and so on. They seldom mention the fact that the current Yankee Stadium shares almost nothing with the Yankee Stadium that those legends played in, except for the name. The Stadium received an enormous makeover in the early 70s (totally publicly funded, by the way), to add a few seats and completely drain it of all idiosyncracies and charm. If you see pictures of the original version, it looks more like Ebbets Field or the old Tiger Stadium, a classic pre-war ballpark. The redesigned version that opened in 1976 looks like Shea Stadium in navy blue (which even the most ardent Mets fan will tell you is a bad thing). So when people lament the impending loss of the House that Ruth Built, guess what? That place has already been gone
for over 30 years.

But again, the full-press Yankee love was hardly surprising. What I did find surprising was the unbridled worship of George Steinbrenner that came along with it. During the broadcast, Joe Buck went out of his way to spend an entire inning talking about how great Steinbrenner was, and how he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Tim McCarver, who I think might now be legally retarded, agreed with him, as if Big Stein was a much a no-brainer HOF vote as Mariano Rivera.

Today’s NY papers were all pretty much in line with this POV, praising Steinbrenner and his winning winningness, and his ability to have his team’s stadium host an All Star Game. Midget Mike Lupica’s column was typical of the lot, chronicling George’s trip onto the Yankee Stadium field as if it was Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

At this point, I have to rub my eyes and blurt a Hanna Barbera-ish “ah-geda-ah-geda-HUH?” Because apparently I blinked some time in the last 15 years or so, and it must have been at the exact second someone switched the setting on George Steinbrenner’s Public Opinion to Adoring Adulation. Because for as long as I’ve been alive, it was set at either Derision, Disgust, or Searing Hatred.

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