Jimmy Sez

In our first two installments of this series we covered the bottom half - in terms of quality - of plaques currently sitting behind the centerfield wall of Yankee Stadium. Now we're ready to dive into the good ones, the ones that start to capture the essence of why these guys matter to the most successful franchise in baseball history. If you ever visit Monument Park with the intention of learning something about the Yankees, I would start with these. In the bottom left corner above, you can see the original three monuments in the field of play at Old Yankee Stadium. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain As was the case previously,  I won't share a picture of every plaque because they tend to run together and get redundant as you scan through them. For any that I don't have a picture of below, it's relatively easy to find via google . 16. Phil Rizzuto - dedicated on August 5, 1985 Scooter's plaque was made in 1985, so I know this isn't the case, but I could swear th...

Last month we began our review and rankings of the plaques on display at Monument Park. We're back with a new batch of bronze. The eight plaques featured here are a notch above the group we looked at last time, but they're not anything to write home about either. Rest assured that things will be looking pretty good from here on out. Ground-level view of the original Monument Park in Old Yankee Stadium. wallyg/Wikimedia Commons As was the case last time,  I won't share a picture of every plaque because they tend to run together and get redundant as you scan through them. For any that I don't have a picture of below, it's relatively easy to find via google . 24. Lou Gehrig - dedicated on July 4, 1941 A minimilast approach here for Lou, whose plaque was the second one commissioned by the Yankees after Miller Huggins. The first bit reads just like Babe Ruth's plaque, and awkwardly starts with this sentence: "A man." His consecutive games streak is mention...

Talk about your all-time duds. The Yankees opened 2023 with championship aspirations, yet here we are at the end of September and they are a lost franchise with no direction, identity, or clear path back to respectability. Recent history tells us that there's no reason to have faith in Yankee leadership this offseason, so let's instead re-live the glory days. I have an aunt and uncle that live in Maine. If you haven't been, I highly recommend it, any part of the state will do. Anyway, in my younger days my family used to visit them each summer and one of those years we got to talking to their neighbors who discovered that we were a family of Yankee fans. For some reason, they had a collection of framed photos of Yankee legends in their basement. As Red Sox fans, they had no use for them and offered them to us for the bargain price of zero dollars. Who said Red Sox fans aren't sweethearts? Of course, we took the photos home and put them right in our basement where they r...

Baseball is nothing without fans. That's both obvious and not at the same time. Sure baseball is speed and power, leather and wood, grass and dirt. It's the hit and run, stretching a double to a triple, and the play at the plate. It's a frozen rope, high cheese, and the big fly. But unless millions of fans were willing to show up to their favorite team's home stadium or watch them on TV, it would just be a fun game that people played in their spare time, like horse shoes or bocce. As the biggest contributor to keeping the baseball train chugging, it's safe to say we had lost our way a bit as baseball fans before the pandemic hit. The coverage of the Astros cheating scandal this off-season was certainly exhausting and understandably took its toll on the MLB fanbase, but for years now we as fans have complained an awful lot about baseball. Just as we started to get over the black mark that steroid use left on the game, the pendulum swung the other way. The grumble du ...