A One-Sided Story: The Destruction of Yankee Stadium

I'm pretty sure you've heard by now that they're tearing down Yankee Stadium after this year and the Yankees will move into an adjoining facility with an estimated construction cost of 1.3 billion weak US American dollars. This is fine. Most teams, when confronted with a dilapidated stadium, decide to move into a new one.

The media's reaction is predictable. Rick Reilly waxed as only Reilly can wax about the incredible value of the artifacts in Yankee stadium, suggesting that the pieces of the field are positively sacramental and retain their glorious value for all eternity.

Baseball greats gushed like fruit snacks over their first memories on this hallowed ground.

Goose Gossage: "It was an out-of-body experience,"
Joe Morgan: "When I was running around the bases I hadn't even thought about the home run. I was thinking, I'm running where Babe Ruth ran.

Regular old baseball fans, always suckers for a sob story, got out their purple voices and talked in purple tones about the purple days of Yankee glory. Sportswriters, writing in purple pens, ate it up like it was fucking Grimace.

Peter Caparis was willing to part with "a couple of mortgage payments" so he and his 11-year-old son, Joe, could attend possibly the last major event at the stadium. He never hesitated to pay close to $2,000 a ticket to a broker for box seats close to the visitors' on-deck circle.

Man. I wonder what his wife will say when the bank has to foreclose. I can imagine Mrs. Caparis, in an appropriately shrewish voice, "We could've watched the game on TV! But now we have no house! Good thing you went to that one baseball game and Joe had to stay up half the night just to watch a sacrifice fly while the second-stringers played a longer game than the real all-stars!"

Even Canadians warbled as poetically as their cold Northern hearts can allow. The single-game Canadian RBI record was set at Yankee on Aug. 10, 1935 and tied again on Aug. 12, 1938. This article also informed me that Ferguson Jenkins is the only Canadian-born Hall of Famer, which, according to popular stereotypes about Canadian ethnicity, seems surprising. I bet if you asked most baseball fans who the only Canadian HOFer is, they would guess this guy or this guy.

But here's my problem. It's not with the Yankees, it's with the media coverage of this story:

Why do none of these baseball PURISTS have a problem with the Yankees destroying all this history, sacredness, aura, mystique, and legend for PROFIT?

The sole motivation for the Yankees to move is so that they can make more money than they already have. They can build more luxury boxes, which makes more money. They can have a nicer stadium, so their fans are happier and they can charge more money for seats. Their fans will be more comfortable and thus more likely to buy Scott Brosius vintage t-shirt jerseys.

This is all about the team that gets excoriated on a daily basis for its profit margin and its spending practices. Everyone hates the Yankees for their income and their money. I really don't know why almost NONE of the major media outlets, fans, baseball greats or Canadians has the cojones to say - hey, maybe the Yankees should pour some of their umpteenbillion dollars American into the historic, legendary, sacred stadium so they could keep playing in it?

This is among the most one-sided stories I've ever seen in the media. In all the articles I've read, almost nobody criticizes the Yankees or even suggests that it might be sad that they're voluntarily tearing the "hallowed cathedral" down. Everyone's too busy celebrating and patting themselves on the back about how great Yankee stadium was.

Nobody's noticing that the history is disappearing to make way for the dollar.