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.

I’m a bit of a Red Sox fan. I mean, I’m a Mariners fan through and through; got all the gear, the jerseys, the season tickets, moved into a place just down the street from Safeco… okay, perhaps a bit much.

But I’ve always liked the Red Sox. They play in the coolest stadium in the bigs these days; they’ve got a classic style of uniform and a great amount of club history… and most of all, they hate the Yankees. I mean, hate ‘em.

There is a guy I used to work with (he’s since retired) who says that Seattle is a real bandwagon town when it comes to sports fans. There’s some truth to that, but then all cities are like that to some extent. Attendance regularly goes up when a team is winning. But there’s a LOT of Red Sox fans who’re on a bandwagon; you didn’t use to see so many Sox hats around here until they won the World Series.

Personally, I’ve had a Sox hat for several years. Again, they hate the Yankees, and that hatred is deeper than love… okay, again, taking it a bit too far.

(And the worst thing about the Yankees these days is that collectively, the Yanks of the past several years were fairly decent guys. I really like Joe Torre, the ex-manager. They had some good guys playing for them, like Bernie Williams. Of course, they had some real pricks, too, like Paul O’Neill and Roger Clemens.)

So following up on yesterday’s blog, which touched on the Yanks and Mariners and Sox a bit, here’s a joke for you that I ruthlessly stole from yanks-suck.com (no, I’m not making that domain name up):

A New York family of Yankees fans heads out one Saturday to shop for the youngest boy’s birthday. While in the sports shop, the son picks up a Red Sox jersey and says to his older sister, “I’ve decided to become a Red Sox fan and I would like this Boston jersey for my birthday.”

His big sister is outraged and whacks him and says, “Go tell mom!”

He takes the jersey to his mom and she says “Yes, son?”

“I’ve decided I’m going to be a Red Sox fan and I would like this jersey for my birthday.”

She whacks him on the head and says, “go tell your father!”

“Dad?”

“Yes, son?”

“I’ve decided I’m going to be a Red Sox fan and I would like this jersey for my birthday.”

He whacks his son in the head and says, “No son of mine is ever going to be seen in THAT!”

On the car ride home the father turns to his son and says “Son, I hope you’ve learned something today.”

The son replies “I sure did! I’ve only been a Red Sox fan for an hour, and I already hate you fuckin’ Yankee bastards.”

Now that’s a real Sox fan (and Yankee hater) right there!

Seattle is a very polite city. In fact, we’re often ranked as one of the most polite cities in the US. It’s a surface thing; we also have gained a reputation (deserved, I’m afraid) as being kind of chilly when it comes to being really GOOD friends, but at least we’re polite. (It’s a weird combination of a Scandinavian-Asian reserved outlook on personal relationships, I think.)

For an example, a few years back there was a minor controversy at Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners. On Occidental Avenue, the street my balcony overlooks, as you walk down towards the ballpark there’s a series of vendors. They hawk the typical sports stuff- peanuts and hot dogs, candy, big foam fingers… you know, fan stuff.

One vendor sold t-shirts that had a simple message on them: YANKEES SUCK. This was a pretty decent seller; for as long as we’ve had major league baseball here in Seattle, we’ve had a special hatred in our hearts for the Yankees. (Of course, all good Americans should hate the Yankees. Rooting for them is like rooting for Satan.) The Yankees, for so many years, represented everything that baseball in Seattle was NOT- rich with money, die-hard national fan base, and of course the assholes WON all the time, too.

Can you tell I hate the Yankees?

(Side note: The version of the shirt that we had at Safeco didn’t look QUITE like the one below, although I’m sure club officials would have had more issues if it had:)

ANYWAY… so the Mariners organization had declared that “YANKEES SUCK” was an inappropriate message to have emblazoned across a t-shirt, and they asked people to cover that up or turn it inside out prior to entering Safeco Field for a game. They are trying very hard to make Safeco a family-friendly environment, which I suppose is just fine, but to take it to that extreme is somewhat out of character for a professional sports team.

The deal is that if you want to have a really passionate fan base, well, they’re going to be passionate in their language.

We’re getting a Major Leage Soccer team in Seattle next year. The Seattle Sounders FC will be playing in my backyard, in Qwest Field. They really want soccer to do well and take hold, and so far the club owners have been making a lot of really good moves to do this. They had an online vote for the team name; the “Sounders” wasn’t one of the choices, but well over half of those voting wrote it in, so they went with Sounders anyway. (Historically “Sounders” has been the name of the top-level soccer team in Seattle.)

Another thing they’re doing is they’re going to allow fans to have a vote on whether or not to retain the club’s general manager. Every few years, the fans get to vote on whether or not to keep the guy. A GM doing a bad job will presumably be fired by the fans, which is pretty awesome if you’re a fan of major league sports. (I can’t tell you how many times I wish I could have fired Mariners GM Bill Bavasi by now.)

But I have to wonder how, exactly, soccer is supposed to work in Seattle. Soccer fans are often crazy-passionate about their club. This benefits the team owners (even as it causes them heartache) because it means they’ll sell lots of tickets to games, jerseys, fan merchandise, etc.

Okay, so they’re building a good rabid fan base. Heck, they’ve already sold something like 14,000 season tickets; by MLS standards, that’s really encouraging for a team that won’t even play for another year or so.

What makes me wonder about soccer in Seattle is this:

Come on, come on, come on, Albertini, come on… OK, OK, my boy, perfect, brilliant, brilliant… Come on! Come on! Go! Go! In the goal! There it is, there it is, there it is, my brilliang boy, my dear, there it is, there it is, there- AHHHH! GO FUCK YOURSELF! YOU SON OF A BITCH! SHITHEAD! ASSHOLE! TRAITOR! Mother of God… Oh my God, why, why, why, this is stupid, this is shameful, the shame of it… what a mess [Author's note: Unfortunately there's no good way to translate into English the fabulous Italian expressions che casino and che bordello, which literally mean "what a casino" and "what a whorehouse", but essentially mean "what a friggin mess".] … YOU DON’T HAVE A HEART, ALBERTINI! YOU’RE A FAKER!! Look, nothing happened… Come on, come on, hey, yes… much better, Albertini, much better, yes yes yes, there it is, beautiful, brilliant, oh, excellent, there it is now… in the goal, in the goal, in the- FUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUU!!!

This passage is from Elizbeth Gilbert’s book “Eat Pray Love“, which is a pretty good book (I’m reading it whenever my girlfriend is out of town on a trip and forgets to take it with her) about her year traveling around the world. As you can imagine, she spent four months living in Italy, and during that time she went to a soccer game and that passage is the continual ranting of the old man that sat behind her at a Lazio game she attended.

And that’s exactly how the really passionate fans are. Seriously.

I went to a game in Glasgow, Scotland, that was like that. It was the “Old Firm” game between the two Glasgow top-level soccer clubs, the Rangers FC and Celtic. What an experience! The game was at Ibrox, the home stadium of Rangers. The Celtic supporters had to walk in through a mile-long corridor of armed guards and mounted police; the Rangers supporters were kept away from this corridor by at least a city block by still more mounted police and infantry police in riot gear.

The graffiti on the walls of buildings in the immediate vicinity of Ibrox left nothing to the imagination: “FUCK YOU FENIAN SCUM” was one particularly noteworthy scrawl. “Fenian” refers to Irish Catholic supporters of Celtic in this instance. Or here’s a song that they used to sing at Rangers games, although in the past year or two they’ve been trying to stop it (the club makes an official announcement that the song is prohibited prior to games):

Hullo, Hullo
We are the Billy Boys
Hullo, Hullo
You’ll know us by our noise
We’re up to our knees in fenian blood
Surrender or you’ll die
For we are
The Brigton Derry Boys

I don’t know if they’re still singing the song, but I can testify that the fans were pretty much insane by American (or at least Seattle) standards. They’d scream all kinds of obscenities at the top of their lungs at the opposing fans, with bloodlust in their voices. They were shamefully racist, too; they’d grunt, supposedly like gorillas, when black players for the other team had the ball.

I mean, these guys are serious about it.

To me, I just don’t see how exactly uber-polite Seattle, where there’s actually a public debate over whether or not “YANKEES SUCK” is appropriate for a t-shirt, is going to be able to have the kind of passion that comes with soccer in its stands.

But I do know that I’m excited for it and am seriously considering buying season tickets to the Sounders!

(By the way… “YANKEES SUCK” t-shirts should be standard issue for grade school children in Seattle.)