Lil' Ken Offended By Yankee Stadium

It really must be a slow news cycle, because writers are publishing their bold predictions of things that will happen this season. This one comes courtesy of Ken Rosenthal (er, Rosensquirrel) and is boldy titled "These things will happen this season":

The New Yankee Stadium Will Be Offensive
I'm not talking about how the park will play; that's to be determined. I'm talking about the Yankees opening their monument to excess in the middle of the worst economy since the Great Depression. And no, I'm not forgetting about the Mets and — ahem — Citi Field.

Clearly the Yankees should have cancelled plans to move into the New Stadium based on the fact the fact that the economy sucks. They should have haulted construction when the Dow went below 8,000 and it was 3/4 completed. Nevermind the fact that the construction of the New Stadium actually stimulated the local economy by creating more construction jobs and will continue to by adding more coconcession positions dues to increased points of sale.

And how is that "offensive", exactly? Because the Stadium is extremely nice? Because the best tickets are $2500 each? You know, the seats Ken gets fucking PAID to sit in everytime he covers a game...

(h/t The Sports Hernia)

Click through and read the rest of the article because Ken is certain that A-Rod will not make it through the season, that "there will be no surprise teams" and that Gary Sheffield will hit his 500th home run (he's at 499).

Wow, It's Been A Long Offseason

It has literally been a long offseason; at least a week longer than the thirteen previous ones. It wasn't just that the Yankees didn't make the postseason, they were pretty much dead to rights when they fell 12.5 games back of the Rays and 7 games back of the Red Sox on August 31st. They hadn't even been within 5 games of the division lead since July 31st. The didn't lead the division at any point during the year.

I was lucky enough to attend each of the last three games at the Old Stadium, but by then it was completely apparent that the Yanks weren't going to the playoffs although they hadn't been mathematically eliminated quite yet. It was a great spectacale to behold, but on the field, they were dead men walking.

Despite the fact that missing the playoffs represented a monstrous failure to the organization, the outlook on September 29th was pretty rosy. Dropping Giambi, Mussina, Pavano and Abreu represented a huge amount of payroll relief and the New Stadium was set to bring in a massive influx of new revenue. Sure enough, the Yanks reeled in the top three free agents on the market and significantly upgraded their roster by Christmas.

Since then, we started this blog (and have written over 400 posts), we started our Countdown to Spring Training, Joe Torre's book came out, Andy Pettitte came back, Selena Roberts dropped the bomb, Peter Gammons interviewed A-Rod, A-Rod paused for 27 seconds before saying "thanks", we tried to start another countdown, A-Rod had surgery, the Yankees were outed as a Ponzi scheme, and then the Details magazine article came out.

All this drama has made the chasm between meaningful baseball games pretty excruciating for us Fackers. We don't want to be reduced to talking about bullshit gossipy topics like Jeter's house or A-Rod's revolting taste in women, but unfortunatley those were the most compelling things at the time. I don't think it's a whole lot better to get wrapped up in the ups and downs of Spring Training.

Is anyone else just ready for some baseball that actually matters?