Other things that don't work include your use of "eloquent" as an adverb.

Anything I have to add was already stated much more eloquently by the Times' editorial page in late October, 1963. That, of course, would be the last time New York sold its soul in exchange for a shiny but bland sporting facility. As the wrecking crews descended upon the faded glory of the original Penn Station (and ponder this...the "new" one is now almost as old as the "old" one was when it was declared "too old"), only a handful of people, most of them professional architects, had anything at all to say about it.

And so on October 30 that year, the Times ran an editorial, a few lines of which have haunted me for the past four years, since the first soulless pile for Camden Yards #20...er...The Interactive Yankeetainment Experience was driven into some kid's playground. Observe:

“…[I]t is the shame of New York, its financial and cultural communities, its politicians, philanthropists, and planners, and of the public as well, that no serious effort [to preserve Penn Station] was made...Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build, but by those we have destroyed.”

I can only hope that the Interactive Yankeetainment Experience will grow into itself the way the current iteration of Madison Square Garden has, but just as nothing the Garden ever does can justify the loss of old Penn Station, I would bet my scorecard from Jim Abbott's no-hitter (my first Yankee game, age 8) that once the novelty wears off, the uncomfortable questions will creep in.

But this much I know: whatever else, it will never be Yankee Stadium. Yankee Stadium is dead. The club killed it. McMansion-era America killed it. We killed it. We deserve nothing better than what we got: a very large, very tacky reminder of an age of excess, of what might have been described 46 years ago as "a tin-horn culture," that seems, mercifully, to be receding just a tiny bit at last. But the damage is done, and one day the same questions will plague us as plague the people who said goodbye to the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field go...who shrugged at Penn Station, that nearly let Grand Central go with it.

And until I find the answers, my ballclub, as far as I'm concerned, is homeless.

"The Yankees have allowed just 49 runs in their 16 wins this season but have given up 149 runs in 17 losses."

Hooray for the Yankee pitching staff.

I'm not sure what's sweet about it. Bitter, sure.

I was also impressed (and not in a good way) with the bravado of the "Yankees-Steiner took it down!" banner. (http://box323.blogspot.com/2009/05/truth-in-adver... but if I said I was surprised, I'd be lying. This organization spent a decade and a half whining about its home so that we'd buy them a new one, and it worked, so why would they stop now?

I find that nothing pegs a commodity as overpriced more clearly than going to ridiculous extremes to imbue that commodity with exclusivity.

After all, if you were stupid (or insecure, or hopeful about your ability to use conspicuous consumption as a substitute for a personality, or whatever) enough to blow what I make in 2 months on a pair of tickets to watch a mediocre baseball team play in a rather generic setting, you'd probably feel okay about it as long as you thought you were getting something no one else could ever have.

But the illusion that you've somehow done something rational would shatter pretty quickly if some doofus who makes a point of only going to a game when those $5 promo tickets are available (a doofus such as I) can enter your stately pleasure dome, even for a moment. You'd start asking those tough questions, like whether you'd even be a baseball fan if your parents hadn't been able to take you to a game now and then as a kid, or whether you're wasting your money on these stupid tickets and should probably have spent the half-million you pissed away on two 81 game plans behind home plate on a substantial house or 27 Volkswagens or 500,000 orders of Wendy's chicken nuggets.

And when people ask themselves the hard questions, they often put their wallets away...and then what? Then the people who run the Yankees would only be disgustingly rich like other baseball owners, rather than mind-bendingly, vomit-inducingly, obscenely rich as they aspire to be.

We can't have that now, can we?

I realize the no re-entry rule is nothing new, but once you start bending it, as they apparently did, then you're just confusing this issue. Actually it sounds exactly like the debacle known as the final game at the real Stadium, when we were told come on in at 1pm for the 7pm start and walk around the field. Then they wouldn't let us in at 1. Then they let people linger on the field seemingly forever so that the vast majority of people who got there early still got shut out. The complete lack of communication among Stadium staff has always been a problem, and I'm glad to see it's one of the few traditions that's actually carried over...

Scott Kameniecki. Or maybe Black Jack McDowell.

Edit: No, actually, I take it all back. My money is on Melido Perez.

Four years ago I lost my father, and last year I lost an aunt, both without warning. Over these years I've spent some time thinking about the difference between the terms "bereaved" and "bereft," and come to realize how tough it is to be the latter.

When someone you love is dying and you know it, you've come to grips with it somewhat by the time it actually happens. You're bereaved, something most people have been at one time or another, and you have, by the time the moment comes, found a way to handle being a bereaved person. You become nothing else for a few days, because you've resigned yourself to playing the part for a while...it's the only way through. The mourners come, they bring food, as you say, for the dead. Pleasantries are exchanged, you all agree that at least s/he's not suffering anymore, and they go. And over a few days, you find yourself drifting back to a state of normalcy, where you will, by and large, manage to remain until something concrete pulls you back. And even that will dissipate over time.

But when you're caught off guard, when someone was in good enough health that it never even occurred to you they were capable of dying, and then they are snatched away, it's a whole different ball game (no pun from a fellow blogger intended). You play at normalcy from the beginning because you are ill-equipped to even recognize what's happened. When I lost my dad, I was in London. The flight home was like a dream to me. I watched "Kicking and Screaming" on the plane, trying to explain Will Ferrell to a British professor in the next seat. The platters of cold cuts, the fact that my two aunts were staying for those days with my mother and me, it was all a game. The only thing that wasn't a game, with the world upside down, was baseball. It was the last week of September, and the Yankees were overcoming a lackluster season to snatch first place at the last moment. I gave due diligence to finishing marking the W's and L's on my dad's Xeroxed schedule, across the top of which he'd written in his lunatic's handwriting that I inherited, "THE 2005 NEW YORK YANKEES... LOOKING BACK! LOOKING FORWARD! SUCKING BADLY!"

When you're bereft, the mourners come, they bring food, as you say, for the dead. Pleasantries are exchanged, you all agree that it's so hard to believe this could happen. But only when they go do you start to comprehend that this is for real. Unlike being bereaved, there is nothing cathartic about it. Everything's backwards. You will have played at normalcy (it's either that or become catatonic), with the help of accomplices like baseball while everyone was impressed by your ability to get through it, and then only when things quiet down and all the customary accoutrements of mourning, all the things that are supposed to make it easier, have passed away along with your loved one, you're still left to figure out what the hell just happened. And still everything is wrong. Things that should bring joy bring pain because the person who should have shared it with you is missing. For lack of a way into being bereaved, you've spent your allotted bereavement time drifting along and trying to act natural. And still everything is wrong. When the Giants won the Super Bowl, I was happy for about five minutes and then I was sad for about five days. My father never got to see that magical season. Things that are completely insignificant suddenly matter a lot. When they tore down the old American Airlines terminal at Kennedy, a building for which I had no particular affinity though its vast stained glass mural was sort of impressive I guess, I was deeply saddened. That was the last place I saw my dad, and like him, it was gone. So it goes.

At any rate, all I can say is hang tough. It's never easy, especially when it happens suddenly, but as you're already able to see, life goes on even when we don't feel like going on without someone. You and your family have each other to lean on, and in the end, that's bigger than the loss.

I come down on Swisher's side. In baseball as in life, you very often need to laugh to keep from crying. Posada's remark disappoints me, as it sounds like something Joe Girardi would say. Is Jorge positioning himself to follow his predecessor behind the plate into the role of "most dour Yankee manager since Dallas Green"?