Blue White Illustrated

native of Connecticut, Boston Col- lege coach Steve Addazio spent summer days as a child traveling down to the Bronx with his father to catch games at Yankee Stadium. He surely has memories of the old white facade above the outfield fence, and maybe he sat in the rustic black bleachers in center field, otherwise known as "Batter's Eye View." It wasn't until 2012 when Addazio re- turned to Yankee Stadium, and it was actually for the very same bowl game in which his team is about to play. (His son, Louie, now a tight end at BC, was then a freshman at Syracuse.) But nev- er did Addazio anticipate a day in which he, himself, would be on that field competing. So prior to finding the podium for the opening press conference of the 2014 Pinstripe Bowl for a rather impassioned speech, he took a personal detour. "I had to go outside and I had to look inside the stadium," he said. "Growing up in Connecticut and coming down with my dad to Yankee Stadium, I never really thought there would be a day when I could take the field at Yankee Stadium, the greatest sporting venue in the world." It would have been a pretty special moment – returning to the setting of childhood memories – if only it had been the same stadium in which they occurred. The new Yankee Stadium is much dif- ferent than the one Addazio visited as a kid, and no longer can it be considered the greatest sporting venue in the world. Well, maybe from a pecuniary and glitz-and-glamour standpoint, but it doesn't carry the same clout as the one Addazio, and myself, visited as kids. Sure, it looks similar. There's still that famous white facade behind the outfield walls, and the field dimensions are pre- cisely the same. But in no way is this version akin to the one constructed in 1923. When New York raised the new 50,000-seat stadium in 2009 – it'll be a few thousand seats smaller with a foot- ball field inside – it was constructed af- ter one of the most successful, most fi- nancially lucrative 15-year runs in club history, and there have been a lot of successful runs in that history. The new stadium wasn't built because the old one was about to collapse. No, as one would expect from deep-pocketed ownership, it was built to further com- mercialize the Yankees' product, and it came at the cost of what made the old Yankee Stadium so unique: a historical air that stemmed from a no-frills model centered on the success happening on the field rather than in the concourse or suites surrounding it. Considering how ownership took a similar approach with its roster man- agement in the recent decade – overpay for the glitz and glamour at the expense of the tried and true – it wasn't all that surprising. Partially as a result, the Yankees haven't been to the World Series since this stadium's inaugural season, and they've experienced a gradual on-field decline, missing out on the playoffs in each of the past two seasons. Atten- dance numbers have also slipped by an average of nearly 8,000 fans per game compared to the final four seasons in the old ballpark. It's the old battle of form vs. function. The new one might have the form of a world-class stadium, but it certainly has not shown that function – at least for a championship baseball team. For one of these new-aged, spon- sored-by-anyone bowl games, on the other hand – such as this New Era Pin- stripe Bowl – we might have a closer fit. Similar to the bowl titles – Popeye's Chicken, Hyundai and Bitcoin are just a few of the absurdities this year – the Yankees have also been selling extra ad space. They've stopped short of the naming rights for the stadium, thankfully, but remember those cheap black bleacher seats in center field? They've been re- placed by tinted glass windows and the MasterCard Batter's Eye Cafe. How fit- ting. Audi, Delta and Jim Beam also sponsor suites and clubs, whereas the old stadi- um had the Pinstripe Club and Great Moments Room. The old stadium host- ed bowl games, too, and as you'd expect, those games had more traditional names, like the Gotham Bowl in 1962 between Miami and Nebraska. As a sign of the times, it seems to only make sense now that its annual bowl game is sponsored by a hat company. Ironically, though, above all the modernity of bowl season, this matchup between Penn State and Boston College is a blast from the past. A showdown between two traditional Eastern powers that perennially battle for recruiting territory, it stands in contrast to the normal bowl climate of today, which seems to be as much about the destina- tion and the sponsor's "swag bag" as the actual teams playing the game. Instead of spending the week at a sunny locale, PSU and BC will spend Christmas closer to home in the sub- freezing temperatures of the North- east, and it's right where they belong. Rather than being about the glitz and glamour – New Era doesn't even pub- licly disclose its swag beforehand – this game is about what's happening on the field, perhaps more than any other bowl matchup outside of the playoffs. Even if the stadium isn't. ■ LAST WORD T I M O W E N | O W E N . T I M . B W I @ G M A I L . C O M A A new era indeed

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