Going... Going... It is Gone!

[dalyduo]

Today the last professional baseball game will be played in the old Yankee Stadium. In the next year its parts will be disassembled and auctioned as memorabilia, never again to be the historic sum of their parts.

As a kid I lived for baseball. Listened to Yankee games on the radio and watched them on our black and white TV (Color wasn't around yet) I played every day on our suburban street with my friends until called in for dinner or it was too dark to play. For a couple of years I was a catcher on a good little league team with a great coach. Those were the happiest days of my youth.

From Yankee Stadium Mel Allen opened every broadcast with “Hello there everybody!” he was your favorite uncle welcoming you to a wonderful event. Mel would call home runs off the bats of Mantle, Marris, Berra, Howard, Skowron, Kubeck, Boyer and Richardson in his lyric deliberate southern drawl. “That ball is going… going… it is Gone!” Baseball permeated everything I did all summer. Playing it, listening to it and watching it never wore me out.

My dad took me to my first game at Yankee stadium when I was about 8. We drove past the Polo Grounds, then at the end of its life cycle, and I’ll never forget seeing Yankee Stadium loom up into my field of vision from the Major Deegan Expressway for the first time. Massive and cathedral like with that famous façade and simple block letter sign on its side that said:

“Detroit 1pm
Old Timers Day”

There was a massive traffic jam to the parking lots and a huge crowd filing in. I’d never seen so many people in one place. The old stadium sat about 63,000 people (68,000 with standing room) and there weren’t many empty seats on Old Timers Day.

That first trip up the pedestrian concrete ramps was intimidating. It was dark, noisy and crowded. The place reeked of Ballentine Ale, hot dogs and cheap Stogie cigar smoke… Not exactly a playground to an 8 year old. But the landscape shifted when I caught my first glimpse of the grass. In the absence of color and light in the concrete walls and railings, when the most beautiful sunlit manicured green grass field that I’d ever seen came into view, I couldn’t believe my eyes. 47 years later I still remember how I felt that first time I saw the Yankee Stadium diamond. It was thrilling and breathtaking. And that was just the field.

Dad and I would go to a couple of games each year and always to Old Timers Day. We usually sat in the same loge seats in Section 22 just above a massive TV camera that sat in its own special box attached to the loge facing. One year I brought a transistor radio so I could listen to the game broadcast. The cameraman saw me leaning over the railing with my radio in hand and bud in ear. He swung the big turret of lenses up into my face. “Hey kid… Don’t look at the camera!” So I followed orders and dutifully studied the field and fiddled with the radio. We got a few calls from neighbors who said Phil Rizzuto gave a “Holy Cow! Look at that kid!” exclamation and commented on my being a good fan by both watching the game and listening to it on the radio.

They always had a two-inning Old Timers game, before the regular game, that looked like players in slow motion to my 8 year old eyes. The names didn’t mean a lot to me except for the introduction of Babe Ruth’s widow and Joe DiMaggio, who suited up and hit one out to the monuments (still in play in those days) and then circled the bases before they threw it in. Probably the last time he ever hit a homerun and circled the bases in Yankee Stadium! I loved Old Timers Day because my dad would explain who the old players were and what they’d done. In retrospect it was the best possible way to learn baseball history without the benefit of a computer.

One year there was rain before the game and Max Patkin the clown prince of baseball came out in an umpires uniform like he was inspecting the field and proceeded to do 20 minutes of physical comedy slipping on the wet tarp, getting completely soaked, using baseball bats as oars to row himself across the tarp before ending with a full speed 50 foot belly flop slide across the wet tarp to home plate where he called himself out and then argued with himself. Nothing funnier to an 8 year old and the memory still makes me smile.

The Yankees were in their prime back then and it always seemed Mickey or Roger or Yogi were getting the game winning hit in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and the bases loaded. Buried in a box somewhere I have 8mm footage of one of those moments… It’ll turn up some day. It was so special and magical and it happened with such regularity that you came to expect it. That’s why it was so hard to understand when the Yankees stopped winning in the mid 60’s. The concept of getting older and slower just made no sense to a 12 year old. You didn’t slow down… You just tried harder. Yogi became a left fielder at the end of his career and I remember seeing Mickey hit two homers in one game in the last year of his playing days. On the way to the parking lot rabid fans were arguing whether Mickey’s career was over or not. That was my first introduction to the cruel short cycle of athletic life.

Under the guise of a refurbishment, the original stadium was gutted and rebuilt in the early 70’s. Most of the architectural charm of the old stadium was jettisoned except for the concrete shell. The concrete formula used for the original stadium was actually developed by Thomas Edison and deemed so sturdy by the city of New York that it was left intact when the new stadium was constructed inside it. As charming as the old stadium was it also had a lot of narrow seats with impaired views by the many steel columns that supported the old upper decks. The redone stadium no longer had columns and with only 55,000 seats was a much more fan friendly environment. With the old interior gone at least we had the original shell, field and outfield walls to remind us we were on the same hallowed footprint of baseball ground.

When Stienbrenner created his soap opera of hiring and firing managers, just like Yogi, I swore I’d never go back to the stadium while Stienbrenner owned the team. My low point being a poorly attended day game listening to drunk fans singing, “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack… I don’t care if I ever smoke crack…” to amuse themselves. It was the era of lousy teams, graffiti, drunken brawls in the stands, financial depression, and the rampant ego of an owner who thought the will to win didn’t require knowledge of the game.

The lights came back on briefly about the time Reggie hit his three homers in one World Series game but Billy Martin was a tragic figure and I never considered forgiveness for Stienbrenner until the 90’s when he let Joe Torre, Brian Cahsman and Gene Michael finally run the team that restored the legacy of the franchise.

This new cycle of baseball life coincided with a life cycle of my own. My daughter Julia was born in 1993 and the first song we sang from the rocking chair together was “Take me out to the ballgame”. We'd watch games on TV and when she got old enough I bought good field level seats 4 or 5 times a year to see Jeter, Williams, O’Neil, Posada, Martinez and the rest of that worthy cast of players bring the dynasty back to levels of magic I remembered as a kid.

The first time I took Julia to the stadium I had a knot in my stomach. Wasn’t sure she’d understand or like the experience. It meant more to me than I could explain. We went out to Monument Park and saw the tributes to Babe Ruth, Joe D, Mickey, Roger, Yogi and all the others. We saw how far it was to home plate while batting practice homers landed in the netting over our heads. Still had the knot in my stomach as I showed Julia how to keep a scorecard and what a double play was. Couldn’t tell if she was getting it or enjoying it until about the 6th inning when in the middle of me babbling on about some sort of game minutia I noticed her just looking at me. I stopped and looked her in the eye and she just smiled. “I love you Daddy” she said in the most relaxed open way that absolutely told me she got how much I loved the game and sharing it with her, My heart melted and so did the knot in my stomach. Can’t remember a more wonderful moment between us. The Yankees went on to dominate the way they had when I was a kid. Julia saw Derek, Bernie and Jorge do in her era on the same field what Mickey, Roger and Yogi did in mine. Got to meet Brian Cashman a few years back and thank him personally for working that out for me.

Julia went on to make her bedroom a shrine to the Yankees and their history far beyond anything I ever did. She lived and died on their success. Julia was beside herself with joy when they won and inconsolable when they lost, especially in ’01. She has Yankee drapes, sheets and pillowcases in her room. Shelves of bobble head dolls, ticket stubs and memorabilia. A bulletin board of Yogi’isms and Stadium articles is on her wall. How cool is that!

Hard to explain how special it was to pass into the friendly confines of that Thomas Edison concrete. You felt its age. You felt its history. You felt its spirit and the spirit of New York every time you were there. The stadium had an affect on both the Yankees and visiting players. Every player paid their respects when they visited for the first time and for the last time. Winning there was special and represented the highest level of achievement in the ultimate cathedral of the game.

After today the actual spots where I bonded with my dad and daughter will go away. Won’t be able to see or touch the old concrete walls that Babe and Joe D. actually hit balls over. Won’t see the field where 26 Championships were won, historic football games and boxing matches were fought, and visits by three Popes and Neson Mandella took place.

I know it’s the spirit of the people in a place and not the place itself that makes the magic happen but in this case Yankee Stadium did seem to evoke it’s own special spirit. The new stadium will be close by, just across the street, with architectural features reminiscent of the original one and Monument Park in its usual spot in center field. It will be modern, clean, comfortable, expensive and evocative of the old place… But it just won’t be the same.

It’s always poignant when you cut down a majestic old tree that has endured because there simply aren’t any new old trees to replace it with. Except for the memories it is gone forever.

If Julia has kids I'm sure she'll bring them to the new stadium to see the next generation of players carry on the storied tradition of the team and tell them about the special place across the street where she watched her first game with her dad... Maybe I'll get to come along too!…

[jeffrey Pietz]

Love your post. I have always rooted for whoever was playing the Yankees but I have a son, who at the age of 27, has a Bob Gibson bobblehead on the dashboard of his Volvo. An anachronym explained by the fact that his Dad's favorite baseball memory is Gibby winning his first of two world series MVP awards (a brand new Sting
Ray) against the Yankees in 1964. Growing up in St. Louis about the same time you were doing the same in NY seeing the Cards win against NY was just too magnificent to be believed simply because the Yanks were so damn good.

[Moxie]

How sad, how tragic, what a loss for us all ... to hear that Jeffrey's son drives a Volvo.

[badgersid]

WATER $4.75 and people complain about gas.

at your first game they didnt even have water in a bottle and root beer was .15 cents.

ah for the good old days when a race weeknd was $595.00 dollars a weekend and over revs $1500.

[cdh]

Originally Posted by dalyduo

...That first trip up the pedestrian concrete ramps was intimidating. It was dark, noisy and crowded. The place reeked of Ballentine Ale, hot dogs and cheap Stogie cigar smoke… Not exactly a playground to an 8 year old. But the landscape shifted when I caught my first glimpse of the grass. In the absence of color and light in the concrete walls and railings, when the most beautiful sunlit manicured green grass field that I’d ever seen came into view, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

...like Dorothy leaving the black and white farm house into the technicolor Oz - definitely my most vivid recollection.
The green was so striking coming from the dark ramps and walkways....nice post DD

Originally Posted by Moxie

How sad, how tragic, what a loss for us all ... to hear that Jeffrey's son drives a Volvo.

Originally Posted by badgersid

WATER $4.75 and people complain about gas.

you got that right - of course if gasoline was sold at Yankee Satdium, it would cost $30 a gallon