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Another New York Sweep

The 100th anniversary celebration for Fenway Park, which wasn't nearly as hokey as I thought it might be, received something beyond saturation coverage in Boston media. That was to be expected, right down to the TV stations hawking those commemorative caps with no identifying marks on the outside -- one of most puzzling merchandising moves I have ever seen.

 What I didn't expect was the coverage of the event in today's New York Times. Every one of its stories on the event except for a buried game story was a horrible triumph of the baseball as mystic spiritual heart of America and baseball writing as poesy school. One was by some Sox fan named David Margolick, who's probably some Pulitzer winner for covering nuclear physics or the European Central Bank, and he was every pretentious Sox bigdome fan real Sox fans have made fun of for decades. Reading it was like listening to Doris Kearns Goodwin on her eighth glass of chardonnay. And it was in notable contrast to the Times' much less sentimental coverage of the final days of the old Yankee Stadium and opening of the new one.

 The Globe, by contrast, was reasonably straightforward, almost covering the ceremony as a news event. It was all backwards. It made me wonder if the Times was getting even with the residents of the city that cost the Times corporation about $800 million bucks on its ill-advised purchase of the Globe.
Was the thought process something like this?

 "We can't make money off those people, so at least let's show the rest of the world what twits they can be."

posted by Michael Gee @ 6:08 AM