Yankees celebrate 100th annive...

No baseball club values its heritage more than the New York Yankees, but that instinct led the franchise to an embarrassing situation on Tuesday.

The Yankees opted to utilize the day to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the iconic Yankee Stadium's debut, replete with a logo representing the passage of time from 1923 to 2023. They even created a before-and-after image of their facade.

It would have been a logical milestone to commemorate — the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs did the same with Fenway Park and Wrigley Field in the preceding decade, respectively — but there was one snag. The current Yankee Stadium is not 100 years old.

As you may recall, the old Yankee Stadium was destroyed in 2009, and the club relocated to the new Yankee Stadium. We all watched it happen, and several fans were quick to bring it out on Tuesday. The original Yankee Stadium is now Heritage Field, a gorgeous park complex.

There's nothing wrong with replacing an outdated stadium with a new stadium, but you can't pretend they're the same stadium simply because they have the same name. You can't claim to have a 100-year-old stadium when your last one was demolished 14 years ago. The modern Yankee Stadium is adequate in many ways, but it is not and will never be the home of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle.

The Yankees are attempting to commemorate the anniversary of Yankee Stadium's debut in the same way that they might have commemorated Yogi Berra's 98th birthday next month, with the exception that they did not tear Berra down with a wrecking ball and pave over him with new sod.

A story in the team's magazine that takes some remarkable liberties with the fact that the old and new Yankee Stadiums are across the street from one other adds to the surreality of the Yankees' apparent desire to act as if there has always been one Yankee Stadium:

Again, we're talking about two separate stadiums, one of which the Yankees paid billions of dollars to replace since it was so run-down (and hence not profitable enough). Aaron Judge did not make his Major League Baseball debut in the stadium where Don Larsen pitched a perfect game, and it would be a stretch to claim the Yankees' aura can physically bend time and space. It's all innocuous in the end, but there's a distinct Yankee flavor to the weirdness here.