Emotional

Tomorrow night at the new Yankee Stadium will be emotional for sure. The Yanks will honor Bob Sheppard and George Steinbrenner before the game.
When I think of Bob Sheppard, I can hear in my mind, his opening remarks every game at Yankee Stadium, simply, "Good afternoon (or evening) ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Yankee Stadium."
He was everything a P.A. announcer should be. The sad fact is he probably wouldn't get hired today by any team. They would say, "He's boring. He doesn't yelling for the home team and he doesn't draw attention to himself."
Too bad he couldn't have made it to October 20th. That would have been his 100th birthday.
As for The Boss, he always clamored for the front and back pages of the newspapers. He didn't care about bad publicity. His feeling was any publicity is good publicity.
I don't know how things will pan out in the future regarding the Yankees ownership. But I do know, things won't be the same. You can say George was a tyrant. You can say he was a winner. You can say he was a philanthropit. You can say you liked and hated him all at the same time. The one thing you cannot say about George Steinbrenner was that he was boring. He even upstaged the All Star game by dying on the morning of the event. Also, he picked a convenient time to die for his family due to the one-year gap in the estate tax. If he died last year or next year, his heirs would have to shell out around a half a billion dollars.
Yes, it will be an emotional night in the Bronx. I remember the most emotional night in the old Yankee Stadium. It was on August 6th, 1979. That morning the Yankees attended the funeral of captain Thurman Munson who died in a plane crash four days earlier. Bobby Murcer read the eulogy. That evening at the Stadium, Murcer drove in all five runs, including a 2-run single in the bottom of the 9th, to give the Yankees a 5-4 come-from-behind win over the Orioles. I can still remember watching that game on TV with my teary eyes and listening to Howard Cosell talk about Murcer's heroics in memory of his deceased friend and teammate. Even now, writing about it on this blog, I'm getting choked up.
So good bye to the "Voice of God" and to "The Boss." It won't be the same without them.