The Empire

You can always tell who built the empire and who inherited it. Art imitates life on the silver screen in just such a scenario in countless movies we have seen over the years. Too many to list, I can tell you this: Alec Baldwin and Hugh Grant would be the perfect douche-bags to play Henry “Hankenstein” and Hal Steinbrenner. Hank and Hal, in just under three years time, have completely ruined the greatest sports franchise of all time. They have taken away the heart and soul of the most passionate fans in baseball. Leaving most of them on the outside looking in (from the Hard Rock Cafe). To take away Yankee Stadium from Yankee fans is like taking away the Coliseum from Romans. Or like taking away hope from Mets fans. (Aww too soon?) And for what?

A team rich with history and tradition and all its glory now has as much mystique and aura in their “New” park as their kid sister’s place over in Queens. This is worse than when Michael Corleone died, slumped over in a chair at his Palazzo in Sicily in Godfather III and Sonny’s bastard son took over the family. You sit there watching the whole thing in disbelief. Wondering the whole time how could things be so bad and why you have not turned it off yet. You can’t! It’s the Godfather!

You see what I’m sayin? Watch what I’m tellin you.

Hank and Hal have destroyed all that was good about the Yankees. They have made the Yankees everything everyone ever accused them of being when in fact they were not. Worst of all they threw their fans under the bus in the process. In 10 or 15 years Hank and Hal will sell the team to another yet undeserving “collared shirt” who knows nothing about baseball or its history or his responsibility to it as the owner of what once was the greatest franchise in sports.

This I know for sure will never be the case in the “New Yankee Stadium”:  “…nothing is as compelling as walking into Yankee Stadium and taking a deep breath as you feel the chills run through your body at the first sight of that perfectly groomed green checkered grass. Or the feel of Royalty and Excellence that surround and embrace you when seated in the in the dark blue cathedral in the Bronx simply known as “The Stadium”