Chez Chesler

As I write, the Major League Baseball All-Stars are playing for the last time ever in the stadium where Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle played. Or so they tell me. Has everybody forgotten that New York City built Steinbrenner a new stadium in the early 1970s, while the City was going broke? If this 35-year-old stadium is the same as the stadium built in the 1920s, why won't the new Yankee Stadium, which I understand is situated on a different part of the same parcel, and which I presume will preserve features like the plaques of great players, also be the same stadium?

Labels: Yankee Stadium, Yankees

The Scooter is dead.

I'm too young to have seen him play, but I grew up with his Money Store ads and his announcing the Yankees on the radio.

I remember one call from a late 1970s summer, a pennant race not unlike the current season, except then the pennant meant more, and I had not yet gone over to the dark side.  Rizzuto's call went something like this: "It's a long fly ball.  It's going... It's going! (pause) Holy Cow!  (pause) What a fantastic one-handed catch!"

Baseball was a lot more fun to listen to when Rizzuto was announcing.

I never got around to sending him a fan letter, and I never got around to sending one to Milton Friedman before his death last fall.  I think that leaves only Yogi Berra still alive of my childhood heroes.

Labels: Heroes, obituary, Rizzuto, Scooter, Yankees