Wednesday was my first full day in New York. I decided to go and see how the World Trade Center rebuild project was going, so I took the hotel shuttle to the AirTrain, and got on the E train to the end of the line in southern Manhattan. The whole area is a building site still, as you would expect, but it is all a lot more organised than it was the last time I visited a couple of years ago. They are planning to open the new memorial on September 11th next year - the 10th anniversary of the event itself. There is now a free exhibition that you can go in to look around to see the progress, the stories of people, and designs for the memorial. They have live webcams on which you can see the shape of the two new waterfall pools being constructed. It's still hard to visualise the finished article, as obviously none of the 500 trees are in place yet.
It was 37C/98F today. I made my way back up Broadway graudally, going into shops every couple of blocks or so, just to cool down a little. I found all the mobile phone shops together on 5th Avenue, but of the 3, only T-Mobile do SIM cards for PAYG, and the woman there said I would be better off just using the free wi-fi around the cities as there was plenty of it. So I still don't really have very good access to wi-fi for navigation - all the free wi-fi places seem to need you to visit a web page to accept the terms & conditions before allowing you to access anything, which is a pain in the neck when you just want to see a map. However, when it does work, it works nicely. This afternoon, I spent an hour or so in a Starbucks having an iced mocha coffee and using their network. I wrote some of the blog entry whilst I was sitting there.
This time, I took the B train up to Yankee Stadium which was surprisingly uncrowded - so much so, I thought that perhaps it was an express that wasn't going to stop at the stadium, but it was the right train. This evening, I was up in level 3, without the in-seat service, but thankfully, high up enough to catch the breeze. It made everything tolerable (it was still 90F when the game ended!) The game was much tighter, although the crowd still appeared somewhat lacklustre in their support for the home team. In all the years I've been coming to the USA to watch baseball games, I don't recall seeing many ejections, and tonight's was a good one. Jorge Posada had had the day off until coming in to pinch-hit for the backup catcher in the 8th inning. After being called out on a third strike that looked like it over the batter's box rather than the plate, he started arguing with the home plate umpire. Of course, as he knows, arguing balls & strikes is an automatic ejection, but he wanted to get his money's worth. He was shouting at the umpire, finger pointing and then started drawing lines in the dirt with a bat to show where he thought the pitch was. Even when restrained by his manager, he was still finger-pointing and shouting and trying to get into the umpire's face - it was quite funny to watch. The end result was that the Yankees had to use their third catcher for the 9th inning.
Yankees won by a run. They were lucky, I thought. A number of seeing-eye singles crept through the infield or just over the outstretched hands of the infielders, whereas the A's were hitting them at the fielders every time. I did get to see Mariano Rivera save the game, though - he probably got the biggest reception of anybody except Derek Jeter. It is odd, but nice, to still here the late Bob Sheppard's voice announcing Derek Jeter's at-bats.
The new stadium is going to have to rebuild the mystique that the old, demolished stadium had. It will take time. The previous stadium was built in a time before the Yankees had won anything - this time, they already have done a lot of winning, and that has affected the ambience somewhat - a superiority complex, I'd say. Whilst that goes for the organisation and the fans and probably a few of the players (A-Rod, in particular), it doesn't apply to the two main men: Jeter & Rivera. Both seem to me excellent examples of how professionals should behave.
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