Field of Dreams Live

So far during the "Yankee Stadium finale" broadcast that ESPN is pulling together for the Orioles-Yankees game, there has been a discussion between Joe Morgan and Joe Girardi on the difficulty of retiring from baseball and leaving the game you have played since age 5, an excellent Peter Gammons interview with an ex-Negro League player who hit a home run off of Satchel Paige in Yankee Stadium in the year 1940, a broadcast booth discussion with Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, and the requisite Frank Sinatra tunes taking us in and out of commercial breaks.  The only thing that's missing is a James Earl Jones voiceover about the centrality of baseball to American life and fathers and sons playing catch in the outfield as they turn off the lights.  If Lifetime is "television for women," then this game is "television for men."  

As for "The Stadium" itself closing, well, it didn't have to close, but it sure as heck needed to clean up its insides.  Like most old ballparks, the bowels of the stadium were pretty run down, and not in a charming way.  The concession offerings (at least in the outfield) were mediocre, and--according to those who knew it back then--it lost a lot of its charm following the renovations in the 1970s.  Still, it's a nostalgic night for baseball fans of any rooting persuasion.  There's a lot of history (baseball and non-baseball) that went down in Yankee Stadium, and now that the Boston Red Sox have displaced the Yankees as the Evil Empire of Annoying Fans, I don't have the same visceral disgust for the pinstripes. Until they win their next World Series, that is.   

Over/under on the next Orioles World Series appearance: 7 years.