In every major league clubhouse, there is a sign that says “if you bet on baseball, you will be permanently banned from the game.”

Pete Rose bet on baseball.

He’s banned for life. Period. I think this is a no brainer.

There’s some discussion of reinstating him:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/24/pete.rose/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

I think that idea stinks.

The only way I’d let Rose into the Hall of Fame is after he dies, THEN I might posthumously reinstate him and allow the HoF to let him in. I’d do the same for the other guys who’d probably get in if they hadn’t been booted for betting on baseball.

But even that… I don’t know. Maybe the HoF should have a separate section somehow and say “these guys should be in the regular Hall of Fame, but their behavior was so bad that instead we’re forced to recognize both their baseball accomplishments and how they screwed over the game” or something like that.

Letting Rose in while he’s alive, though? No-brainer… the answer is “absolutely not.”

After having heard a lot about how nice the Giants’ new park in San Francisco is, I finally got down there.

I’m…. underwhelmed.

Don’t get me wrong- it’s a really cool park. I love how it sits right on the water and how the fence comes in from CF to the right field foul pole, and the kayakers hoping for HR balls in the water beyond.

I also really like how they designed it so that the vast majority of the seats in the upper decks have a nice view of the water. That’s cool.

The design choices they made are cool, too- very much like Safeco Field, with lots of brick and nice dark-green-painted steel girders and structural supports.

But we went on a little walkabout around the whole stadium, and some parts of it were fairly lame. The concourses were actually pretty bad- quite narrow and crowded, far worse than Safeco’s gets. We were at a game that started at 6 so perhaps it’s worse than normal with a lot of people ordering food at the park, but man, those walkways were really small and really jammed.

When you come through the RF walkway there’s one part where it’s so narrow I’m surprised it met codes.

And those concourses are just too… busy. With color. Everywhere you look, there’s signs and advertisements (and I mean EVERYWHERE) and they’re all in garish colors (granted, the Giants primary color is orange, so you’re going to see a ton of that) and there’s just too much stuff that’s too cute by about half.

Instead of looking old-school advertisingish, it just looks like someone with ADHD went off and put up signs willy-nilly.

The seats were okay. One thing I liked was that the second deck hangs low over the 100 level. Some people don’t like it because from the concourse it cuts off your view a bit, but I liked it because it means those seats are pretty good seats. They also continue all the way around behind home plate, where at Safeco the spot directly behind home is taken up by the giant press box.

On the downside, those seats range in price from $68 to $85 a game! Holy overpricing, Batman! At Safeco they range from $65 to 70 for individual game pricing, and are just $45 if you buy them as season tickets.

In fact, every “premium” seat at AT&T costs considerably more than its counterpart in Safeco. In the Giants’ defense, they financed their park themselves; I’m not sure about land costs but I know that the actual construction was pretty much all privately paid for by the ownership group. So in a way, I can handle them charging it- it’s their gig, they can do what they want.

And the upper deck seats are priced much closer to Safeco’s. They’re a bit closer to the field, but they’re also a bit higher off the ground, so it’s kind of a wash there.

All in all, I wonder if maybe my impression of AT&T was influenced by the weather. August 1st and it was about 55 degrees, breezy, and with a leeeetle bit of mist/drizzle falling. Ginger and I earlier were walking around town (we walked from our hotel at Union Square Park through Chinatown to North Beach for some food, then back to the hotel and then down to the ballpark) and got a bit chilly. Then again, that’s just San Francisco for you, I guess.

Oh, that reminds me- AT&T park is a bit of a hike from much of anything. From our hotel to the park felt like it was roughly equivalent in distance as from walking all the way down from Belltown to Safeco (I know I’m comparing it to Seattle a lot, but that’s what I know best so that’s why I use that as a comparison) except that from Belltown to Safeco, you go through areas that have stuff going on and the park is right on the edge of Pioneer Square.

In SF, you’re walking through a heck of a lot of nothing. It seems like the area is going to recover, but right now there’s not a lot of anything distinctive there.

Maybe on a bright sunny day with mid-70s I’d like AT&T Park better, but right now, I don’t think so. It’s a great park, way better than a lot of the older-school parks out there (and FAR better than Candlestick), but given the choice I’ll stick with Safeco Field.

So just a quick post with impressions of Yankee Stadium. It’s pretty cool… but it is definitely old. The concourses are awfully narrow and have low ceilings, the layers of paint are chipping and peeling, the seats are old… of course, as soon as they knew for sure that they were building the new stadium, they probably quit doing anything other than minimal upkeep of the current park.

I didn’t get there in time to see Monument Park and see all those retired numbers and so forth. They close it off something like 45 minutes prior to gametime, and we were there by then (Boston was still taking BP) but they’d closed the monument area off early because of the big crowd.

G talked me out of wearing my Boston hat, which was a bummer; there were plenty of people wearing Red Sox jerseys and hats and such in the crowd. While they did get a hard time from the Yankee fans (which is pretty much everyone there) it wasn’t too vicious. Then again, in the seat next to me was a guy who was pretty die-hard; he probably wouldn’t have appreciated a Red Sox hat much at all.

I wore my old-school Mariners cap instead, and a lot of people didn’t even know what it was, I think.

Our seats were pretty dang good but still reflected old design; to see home plate we had to turn sideways in the seat and look through/over people in the section to our left. And the wall where we were at rises up from just over waist-high to almost chest-high by the end of our three-seat row.

Getting to The Stadium from midtown Manhattan was easy- just jump on the subway. Getting back was much tougher, as everyone in the crowd leaves at more or less the same time. I’ve noticed the same thing when it comes to driving in/out of my place here in Seattle on football game days; the only time I make a point of absolutely avoiding is immediately post-game.

Being in Yankee Stadium was awfully cool, though. The history of the place and thinking that Babe Ruth walked on that grass where his modern-day heir to baseball studliness, Alex “Like A Virgin” Rodriguez is walking, was amazing.

(And I’ve got a post or two in me about what a jackass A-Rod has become.)

The place is rich with history and you just know that it’s such a cherished spot. The fans are nutty (not just at the park, but all over the city) and know their baseball (I’m not following it as much this year out of disappointment with the M’s).

All in all, I’m very happy I made the trip, and thought it was definitely worth it.

So today I’m getting a tiny inkling of what it might have been like for the old Christians heading into the lions’ den. Well, okay, not like THAT, but still… I’m going to The Stadium for the first time.

To baseball fans, Yankee Stadium is a bit of a Mecca. The evil and hated New York Yankees have won 26 World Series championships, 39 American League pennants. Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Maris. Don Larsen threw a perfect game in a World Series. Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra… Casey Stengel running the show. Later they had Jackson, Munson, Bucky Fuckin’ Dent…

These guys are giants, legends of baseball.

Growing up in Seattle, the Yankees were everything that the Mariners weren’t. The obvious is World Series winners- the M’s haven’t yet even MADE it to the Series. But they also were just so good and had all the money in the world to sign great players, and we (and the rest of the league) got occasional castoffs.

The Yankees were big and rich and famous and dammit, I hated them. One of the best moments in Mariners history was May 8th and 9th, 1981, when Tom Paciorek hit game-winning walkoff home runs in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Yankees. Two nights in a row! I saw the second one in person and was delirious.

The Mariners and Yankees had one of those rivalries that was totally one-sided; we hated them, and they probably barely even knew we existed. We were just one of the weak sisters in the AL West that they regularly beat the stuffing out of.

So thumping the Yanks in 1995, coming back from a 2-nil deficit to wind up winning the Divisional Series in the playoffs… that was absolute heaven for a Mariners fan.

Anyway, they’re building a new ballpark for the Yankees next door to old Yankee Stadium, and they’re playing the All-Star game in The Stadium this year for the final season. And today, the Yankees’ true rivals, the Boston Red Sox, play the Bronx Bombers at 8pm on a nationally televised game.

And I’m in the FRONT ROW. Woo-hoo!

My girlfriend, G, lived in Zoo York for a few years, and she insists that I am absolutely, positively NOT allowed to wear my Red Sox hat to the game- and no red shirt, either. Since I want to be able to enjoy the game and won’t if I am getting continually harrassed by drunken morons (which sums up the Yankees’ fan base) I probably won’t.

But I’m wearing my old-school Mariners hat, with the trident design.