No Vvuvuzelas in the Bronx

Those vuvuzela horns may be all the rage at the World Cup in South Africa, but the Yankees won't let fans toot, toot, toot for the home team.

When "bleacher creature" Anthony Zachariadis wailed on one of the plastic horns at Tuesday night's game, Stadium security snatched it out of his hands.

"You gotta give me the horn," the guard told him, inducing a chorus of boos from the bleachers. "You can't blow it."

...

Even though the denizens of the bleachers are known for being loud using just their own voices, Zachariadis said he couldn't resist trying them out at the Stadium.

"I hid them in my shorts to get into the stadium, and when I pulled out the horns, the whole place went nuts," he said.

"Phillies fans would walk by and we would blow it in their ear," he said. "They had a laugh -- they knew we were playing with them."

...

Zachariadis finally agreed to leave the game in return for not having his horns seized.

"I have been tossed from that place hundreds of times. Many times I even deserved it," he said. "But this was ridiculous."

While the thought of a Phillies fan taking the buzz of a vuvuzela in the ear does make me smile, I'm glad they're keeping those annoying horns out of the stadium.

Posted byGreg Cohen

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Moseley Could Be Bronx Bound

From Tim Bontemps:
After being scratched from his start for Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre last night, Dustin Moseley could be on his way to The Bronx.

The 28-year-old right-hander, who is 4-4 with a 4.21 ERA in 12 starts, was a late healthy scratch from his start against Rochester in favor of Kei Igawa. Because Moseley has an opt-out clause in his contract if he isn't on the major league roster by Thursday, there's a good chance he will be promoted in the next 48 hours.

As of last night, though, Yankees GM Brian Cashman said no decision had been made.If he does get called up, and the Yankees decided to go with the extra pitcher, they could send Colin Curtis or Chad Huffman back to Scranton. The other option is going with an 11-man rotation, and either sending Chad Gaudin packing or optioning Boone Logan back down to Scranton. They could say goodbye to Chan Ho Park, but I think it's more likely that Gaudin or Logan are moved.

Posted byGreg Cohen

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The old Yankee Stadium comes down: newyorker.com

The old Yankee Stadium comes down: newyorker.com



The Pull
by Nick Paumgarten
March 22, 2010 Text Size:
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Yankee Stadium;Demolition;Bronx, New York;Macombs Dam Park;Parks Department;Geoffrey Croft;New York City Park AdvocatesExcept maybe for courtside at Madison Square Garden, the best place these days to watch a New York institution fall to pieces is the 161st Street subway station, in the Bronx. From the No. 4 train’s southbound platform, you can observe the ongoing demolition of the old Yankee Stadium, which will vanish completely by June. If you’re riding up from Manhattan on the No. 4, your first glimpse is no longer of that sliver of lush and lit-up turf but, rather, of an expanse of ruin—a half-blasted hulk.

Last week, the demolition crews went after the upper decks. They cut them into sections and pulled one down each day. They started along the old third-base line, tearing open chunks of sky. Each afternoon, a small pack of spectators gathered along the subway platform, pressing up against a fence, to watch “the pull.”

On Wednesday morning, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is overseeing the demolition, and the Parks Department, which owns the land and is replacing the old structure with playing fields, invited the press into the Stadium for a last look. The media, in hard hats and fluorescent vests, gathered where the bleachers used to be, in center-right, rubble—rebar, hunks of concrete painted blue—at their feet. The field was a span of dirt. A pair of water cannons sprayed it, to tamp it down, in anticipation of the impending collapse of a segment of upper deck. A half-dozen excavators worked the debris, like grazing dinosaurs.

A few Parks officials led a tour out to their new parks. The new Stadium, visible in the distance, had gone up where Macombs Dam Park had been. The city is compensating the neighborhood for the loss of that old refuge, which was well shaded and heavily used, with a patchwork of new parkland, some of it more than a mile away and some of it on top of a parking garage. This lopsided swap, executed by the Bloomberg administration on behalf of one of North America’s richest professional sports teams, at the expense of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, has incurred the wrath of civic and parks activists, among them Geoffrey Croft, the president of New York City Park Advocates. Croft had come along on the media tour, mainly to mutter in the ears of reporters that much of what the officials were telling them was bunk. “I’m here to unspin their spin,” he said.

After the tour, Croft, who is forty-four, and who grew up a few blocks from the Stadium, joined the civilians along the subway-platform fence to photograph the pull. “I used to sneak up here to watch games, before they renovated the Stadium and blocked the view,” he said. A man walked up and showed off a photo he’d taken of the outfield in 1970. His name was Dennis Concepcion. He was fifty-three, Bronx-born. “It’s a sad day,” he said. He told stories about his father’s seats—Box 1-D, right behind home plate, three-fifty a seat—and about his own tenure, from 1971 to 1983, as a Stadium vender. Bug juice, hot chocolate, hot dogs, beer. He passed around a picture of one of his mid-seventies vending uniforms. “Psychedelic,” he said.


from the issuecartoon banke-mail this.Another fan strolled up: Scott, a banker in a pin-striped suit. “I’ve been dreading coming here to see this,” he said. He estimated that he’d been to five hundred Yankee games. His father had been an executive with the Yankees’ old concessionaire, and had season tickets next to the home dugout. “I used to talk to Reggie in the on-deck circle,” Scott said. “I have seats from 1974 in my house. We yanked them right out. They’re mounted in my den.” He went to one game in the new Stadium last season and didn’t go back. “It’s not a ballpark,” Concepcion said. “It’s a mallpark.”

Out in shallow center field, three excavators lined up to commence the pull. Each had hold of a long steel cable that arced into the upper deck. Earlier, a crew had used hydraulic shears and welding torches to weaken the steel girders supporting the doomed section, and then installed temporary wedges to keep it from collapsing on them. Now the excavators reared back until the cables were taut, and the wedges came tumbling out of the stands. The excavators were then hooked up to another set of cables—these attached to the weakened girders—and, after some delay, began backing up again. The cables went tight.

“Oh, Jesus,” Concepcion said. “Here it comes.”

The section, nine tons of steel and concrete, suddenly tilted forward and sank through the air, a giant concrete berg calving from the Yankee glacier. It thundered on impact, and the subway platform quaked. The field, excavators and all, disappeared in a cloud of dust. After a couple of minutes, the dust gave way to the sight of a dead upper deck on the ground; a rack of girders poked out of the concrete like the ribs of an animal carcass. The spectators exchanged contact information so that they could send each other their pull photos. A No. 4 train rolled up, and the crowd dispersed. ♦



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