There is a baseball stadium in town other than the one in The Bronx, you know, and Gary Bettman knows it, too.
Slap Shots has learned that if the NHL wants to bring the Winter Classic to New York on the first day of 2011, Jeff Wilpon already has notified the commissioner that the Mets are ready, willing and able to host it at Citi Field.
“I’ve had several conversations with Commissioner Bettman and have informed him that we’d love to have the game,” Wilpon, the Mets’ COO, told us by phone on Thursday. “Gary has told me that he and his team will come out and do a site visit early in the year, so I know that we are going to be under consideration.”
Beyond that, Wilpon said he has spoken with Rangers CEO Jim Dolan and Islanders owner Charles Wang about bringing the Battle of New York to the nifty ballpark in Queens.
“There’s interest there,” Wilpon said. “I know the Islanders very much would like to do something.”
NBC, whose partnership in the endeavor has been a significant factor in the Classic’s success, isn’t believed thrilled at the concept of presenting a single-market game to the national New Year’s Day audience.
But perhaps the event has become prominent enough as a stand-alone brand name that a New York-New York intramural battle can be attractive enough for the network the way, say, the Rose Bowl is still televised even if Oregon is playing in the game.
And perhaps Bettman will understand the boost the Islanders’ franchise would receive from being featured in such an extravaganza and award the game to them the way the commissioner awards Entry Drafts and All-Star Games to less traditional franchises that get a bump from hosting special events.
Yankee Stadium is scheduled to be the annual site of a Bowl game during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day beginning next year. That would seem to eliminate the possibility of the Winter Classic going to The Bronx, unless the contract to host the Bowl game between Big East and Big 12 also-rans is deferred for a year.
But other than the name “Yankee Stadium,” we all know the structure in The Bronx isn’t the one that remains standing on the other side of 161st Street. This one isn’t iconic. This one isn’t historic. This one, in fact, is less of a fit for a hockey rink and a hockey game than the ballpark in Flushing.
The Mets’ horrid season, the debate over the outfield dimensions and the height of the left-field wall plus the absence of a Mets identity (the latter being rectified for next season) tended to obscure how neat a ballpark the Wilpons built on the Shea parking lot.
“We’d like to have an experience like they had in Boston, where we’d have a few hockey events and open the rink to the community for a couple of weeks,” Wilpon said. “We think we’d put on a great show for the NHL, for hockey, and for the city.
“We have great interest in having the game at Citi Field.”
* So if Tim Gleason played for the Maple Leafs and Mike Komisarek played for the Hurricanes, which defenseman do you suppose would have been named to the Olympic squad by Team USA (and Maple Leafs) GM Brian Burke and which would be left at home?
Rock, meet bottom: The depth of Scott Gomez‘s precipitous decline over the calendar year can be measured by recognizing that the center was never even a candidate to be named to Team USA, when his resume once suggested he’d be a slam dunk for the first-line pivot’s position.
We sure hope Mike Modano‘s criticism of the USA Hockey administration following the disastrous eighth-place finish in Turin in 2006 wasn’t a factor in his omission from this year’s team, because there is no way to be sure it wasn’t.
The unveiling of the team at Fenway was nicely done, but it would have been even better had 1980 Gold Medalists Jim Craig, Jack O’Callahan and Dave Silk announced the Team USA roster by their respective positions rather than just dropping by for an interview.
Of the 20 skaters on each squad, Zach Parise is the only American who would crack Team Canada. And what does that tell you other than an entire generation of Americans (including Gomez) following the group that carried the flag from the World Cup championship in 1996 through the Olympic silver medal in 2002 somehow fell off the map?
Of course, if they play the Winter Classic at Yankee Stadium, we’ll find out if the moat freezes in the winter.