Thanks to Jay Gruber for contributing this one. Jay is the Editor's brother, but he's also an executive at Fox Sports West so he knows what he's talking about.

Legendary wordsmith Yogi Berra once said, "The future ain't what it used to be." In light of recent events in baseball, I tend to agree with him. In my lifetime, I have attended hundreds of baseball games. Much to my wife's dismay I am a huge fan of the game and take every opportunity to visit stadiums around the country. So it may come as a surprise that despite growing up only miles from Yankee Stadium, I only attended two games there in my life. I grew up a Mets fan and I should perhaps preface everything I write here by saying I despise the Yankees and everything they stand for. The majority of my baseball memories reside in a place, Shea Stadium, that is no home to a myriad of legendary moments, but instead is perhaps best known as a testament to poor planning, airplanes fly overhead every five minutes or so during the summer, but not during the winter when they surveyed the site for the land. But with that being said, my first memory of Yankee Stadium is of attending a game with my friend Jeff. I can’t for the life of me recall who played, or what the outcome of the game was, all I can remember is that Jeff's parents were drinking beer during the game, and this struck me as odd because my parents did not drink, and so I naturally assumed that most parents didn't. Not much of a first memory, but oddly that memory stands out as vividly as anything I saw in the hundreds of games in the stadium across town. My second memory of Yankee Stadium is probably equally as inconsequential as my first. Once again, a friend invited me to attend a game there. We went and sat in Yankee Stadium’s world famous bleacher seats. Once again, I have no idea who played or what the outcome of the game was. What I remember is the two drunk guys by us who couldn’t stop talking about the Chassidic Jews in the section wearing Yarmulkes. They had nothing but questions about their "beanies," to the point where these two men left the game, for fear of being harassed further. I don’t think that the drunk guys meant anything cruel about it, but it was just something to do. Not exactly James Earl Jones’ speech in Field of Dreams in setting up the mysterious hold that baseball and one stadium can have over people, but this is what Yankee Stadium meant to me.

In the year 1921, in Babe Ruth's second year with the team, the Yankees were, for want of a better word, booted out of their home at the Polo Grounds, and were left to fend for themselves. In 1923, Yankee Stadium opened its doors. In the 85 years of its existence, it has seen 6581 regular season games, 161 postseason games (most of any stadium), 37 World Series have been played there, 26 times the stadium has hosted the Yankees as the World Series Champions, and nine of those championships were clinched by the Yankees in that stadium. Fans have bore witness to Lou Gehrig’s retirement speech, three perfect games, including the only perfect game in World Series history, Babe Ruth’s 60th home run, Maris’s 61st, Dimaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, Reggie Jackson’s three home run World Series game, Jeffrey Maier’s fan interference home run, and enough Yogi Berra quotes to baffle the wisest of English professors. It has been home to the Sultan of Swat, the Iron Horse, the Yankee Clipper, The Straw that Stirs the Drink, and Donnie Baseball. The words, “Win one for the Gipper” were spoken here, and the Greatest Game Ever Played was contested inside its walls. This is what Yankee Stadium meant to sports.

Yankee Stadium closed its doors for the final time last month. Right now it is slowly being taken apart brick by brick and will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Next year, the Yankees will open a new Yankee Stadium, aptly titled as such, and it will likely be a grand testament to modernity, with concourses so wide you could stand one hundred men the size of Babe Ruth side to side without even a hint of traffic, bathrooms so bright and clean that they will probably need to hand out Reggie Jackson’s shades to protect your eyes, and concessions so varied that you could go on a Mickey Mantle sized bender and still not exhaust your options. It will be all of this and more, but what it will never be again is “The House that Ruth Built." Oddly enough, this didn’t lead me to think about the majesty of the new stadiums I had seen, but instead of the idea of how we as a society always feel a need to tear down tradition for something new.

In 1998, filmmaker Gus Van Sant elected to remake Psycho. Not only did he choose to remake the film, but he elected to simply make a shot for shot remake. He brought in a cast of well-known, talented actors, added color, and had about 20 times the budget that Hitchcock had years before. Other then a scene of implied masturbation instead of inferred masturbation and some minor details, they were essentially the exact same film. I, like many others who might consider themselves “film buffs," either refused to see or panned this idea without giving it much consideration. Remakes were generally bad to begin with, and this one just seemed pointless. I rented the remake of Psycho (sadly this was the only version of the film available at my local video store) this past week. While I watched the film I still couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole exercise was kind of stupid, but at the same time you could not help but admire the craftsmanship. The original Psycho is one of the best directed films of all time and this film certainly maintains that standard. Thus I was forced to ask the question, if a viewer did not know anything about Alfred Hitchcock or the original film, could they enjoy the same experience as someone who viewed Psycho when it was first released, or would a modern audience be better served by a more modern, reimagined version of the film?

The recent trend in filmmaking has been toward the idea of reimagining an existing work, rather then simply remaking it. The new Batman series of films is a perfect example of how taking the concepts of an older work and reworking them for modern times can be an extremely effective and profitable endeavor. Remakes in the horror genre seem to be coming out on a weekly basis lately, which such classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre already made, and Friday the 13th, and The Thing on the way. But in remaking or reimagining whether a success or failure we invalidate what made the original memorable or successful. As Roger Ebert said in his review of the remake of Psycho, “Curious, how similar the new version is, and how different. If you have seen Hitchcock's film, you already know the characters, the dialogue, the camera angles, the surprises. All that is missing is the tension--the conviction that something urgent is happening on the screen at this very moment. The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted.”

The trend in sports now, like in movies, is moving toward reimagining the classic stadiums, into something new and exciting, attempting to build "retro" ballparks that are both modern and beautiful but also remind you of the glory days of baseball when stadiums were built in harmony with the city or the landscape, and thus had buildings incorporated into them or hills or whatever stood in their way. This all began in 1992 and since then 16 of the 30 MLB teams have opened new stadiums. With the Mets and Yankees opening new stadiums next season that will make almost two thirds of the teams in baseball playing in stadiums younger then any player in the major leagues. Now this is not to say that new stadiums are all bad. Frequently, they are beautiful places to watch a game, with comfortable seats pointed directly at the action, clean bathrooms, and a myriad of concession options that put buy me some peanuts and crackerjack to shame. But with this trend comes the negative as well, stadiums have become smaller and more exclusive, ticket prices have skyrocketed, downtown locations have added traffic and parking problems, and the cost of these stadiums can be a burden on the community at large, so why do teams need new stadiums anyway?

There is only one legitimate reason that can be accepted by a rational person, and Thin Lizzie said it best, I want money. A new stadium means they can charge higher prices for everything, and use the stadium as an attraction in and of itself, so that the place will attract more complacent fans who are just there to take in the atmosphere and not to root on their team. Additionally, it allows teams to shift from portions of the stadium from standard seating to luxury areas. You end up with smaller stadiums with larger percentages of luxury boxes and club level seats, so the owner’s cost goes down, while their profits go up. Not to mention the fact that frequently the money is fronted by the community for at least a portion of the stadium, because these teams are often a point of pride and losing them would be worse then spending $1.6 billion dollars to replace the most irreplaceable building in sports.

Thus we are brought to the new Yankee Stadium. For all intents and purposes, it will be a shot for shot remake of the original, keeping the same dimensions and maintaining the elements that made the original Yankee Stadium what it was, only adding in those items that will bring it up to par with the other new stadiums that have been opened recently. But what it will gain in comfort, it will lose in legitimate tradition. No longer will a rookie step on the mound or in the batter’s box and be forced to remember all the greats that have stepped there before him, and perhaps not perform as well because of it. No longer will a team enter the postseason against the Yankees and be forced to consider the fact that three out of every ten World Series winners since the opening of Yankee Stadium have been the Yankees. Anybody who knows baseball knows, batting .300 is the benchmark, which all offensive players tend to measure themselves, and the Yankees have done that as a team. They sacrifice all this for money and for power. But the Yankees are already the richest team in baseball, and anybody who honestly thought the Yankees were going to give up New York to the Mets and move to New Jersey, well I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you may be interested in. Because, like Ebert said, there is something that lies between or beneath the legendary Yankee Stadium frieze that makes it what it is, and no amount of clean bathrooms, or club level seats can replace that, and so the whole effort is meaningless.

I live in Los Angeles now, and whether or not a friend might have had tickets to a game, I doubt I would have made a trip back just to see Yankee Stadium again. But as I listened to LA Sports Radio, perhaps the most bland sports radio of all time, they were discussing the fact that Yankee Stadium was closing a week before the end of the regular season, and not on the final day in some separate from the masses event that everyone could enjoy, while Shea Stadium was closing on the final day of the season. This annoyed me on multiple levels, first and foremost because as a Mets fan, I despise when the Yankees get undo attention just for being the Yankees, but also because I felt the talkers were missing the most obvious point. The reason the schedule-makers had done this is because they assumed the Yankees would make the playoffs, as they had done each year in the thirteen years prior and thus would get their proper send-off in the postseason as would be fitting, whereas the Mets nobody could be sure what would happen. But as the announcers complained and insisted that it be changed, I couldn’t help but be somewhat happy. Perhaps this “mistake” and their missing the playoffs was the start of the Baseball Gods enacting their revenge toward tearing down their cathedral, and perhaps by denying all their success in that building for the pursuit of money, there would be some sort of punishment. But then again, as Yogi Berra said, "It's tough making predictions, especially about the future."