New York : Features
Last Nights at Yankee Stadium
By Dave Bidini
Jul 30, 2008

A PERSON CAN go to New York City for a lot of things, but this time, I went for baseball. Yankees baseball. Maris, Mantle, Yogi, Thurmon Munson, Whitey Ford. Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” and this saying is printed on a gold plaque rooted in Monument Park, which is tucked behind the left-centre field fence (between the Yankees’ and visitors’ bullpens) of Yankee Stadium. At the end of the season, it’ll be dug from the earth and moved across the street to a new stadium now under construction. For the original Yankee Stadium, it’ll be over. I wanted to visit it one last time before it was.

On my first morning in the city, the headlines of newspapers piled high on a trolley outside a 27^th Street magazine depot hollered “Bronx Bubble Bursting” and “Will Yanks Fill in for Phil?” and “Queens Nightmare for Misery Mets.” Atop lunch counters, across cafe tables ringing the promenade around Bryant Park, over subway benches and on torn vinyl taxi cushions, the concerns of New York’s baseball teams were pressed into the city’s consciousness.

Even though the Rangers playoffs, NBA semi-finals, Champions League soccer and Obama-Hillary were all galvanizing events, the hold of early spring Yankeeball was apparent. And when, in the late afternoon, I descended underground and headed north from Midtown to the Ballpark in the Bronx, I found the high rabble of fans heading early to the old park awaiting me.

I stood next to one fellow, whose belly protruded into mine as he announced: “When I saw that Kenny Rogers [of the Detroit Tigers, the Yanks’ opponent for the next three games] was pitching, I nearly wet myself.”

I told him I was grateful that he hadn’t. He laughed a great cheese-steak laugh as the train clanged and shook and sped uptown towards the House That Ruth Built.

When I stepped from the doors of the 4 Train to set foot on the station’s elevated iron platform, I was eye level with one of American sport’s most famous tableaus: the white façade and Romanesque gates that curve across the top of the outfield and possess a self-importance that is both hateable and enviable.

The iron stairs drew me down from the platform to the street, where vendors sell A-Rod and Derek Jeter 8-by-10s scotch-taped to the walls of the old building, patrons spill out of small bars gouged into the arcade below the subway overpass, and taxi cabs play a symphony of coughing engines, bleating horns and Puerto Rican cussing.

This classic ballet reminded me how, over the parade of time, Yankee Stadium has been witness to some of the sport’s greatest moments: DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, Reggie Jackson’s three consecutive homers in ’77, Babe Ruth’s 60 and Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive-game streak. I arrived at the ballpark wanting to stroll leisurely around the grounds before touring Monument Park (because of its impending demise, the area had been recently opened to fans for one last look) but I discovered that, even at 5 p.m. (two hours before game time), thousands of fans had arrived well ahead of me. By the time the Yanks’ batting practice started, there were as many fans inside the park as you’d find at a weekend series at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. Nonetheless, I lined up for my chance to see the Yankee outfield shrine, winding my way along the ramps and hallways inside the stadium until I found the end of the line, leaned my shoulder against a dirty gray-blue wall, planted my feet to the gummy floors and talked baseball with those in front of and behind me.

After being released into the late day’s sunshine, the shimmering green baize of the outfield, the rust-coloured hue of the infield basepaths and the shopworn blue of the clapped-up seats echoed both the game’s classicism and its modesty. The grass and dirt had been elegantly groomed, and the Yankees uniform bore a kind of stolid warrior’s mien, but the seating area had the weathered look of a slumping tenement, belying the grandiosity and success of its tenants.

Above the field, a crappy oversized TV screen showed a movie about Whitey Ford—Bob Costas’ and Billy Crystals’ voices screeching around the ballpark—and the same scoreboard I remember seeing on Saturday afternoon baseball on NBC in the ’70s blinked team stats and announced the game’s lineups. Yankee Stadium, it seemed, was a dump, but, in the end, I was endeared to it even more. Monument Park was the most glorious part of my visit. Despite the constant chatter of those filling the stands and the ear-peeling volume of the Jumbotron, there was a funereal stillness to the memorial, landscaped, as it was, by great beds of tulips and daffodils.

As I filed past the gilded, bas relief busts of Yankee greats, I was reminded what the organization had contributed to our lexicon: Mel Allen’s “Going, going, gone!”; Phil Rizzuto’s “Holy cow!”; and, of course, Yogi’s “It ain’t over ’til it’s over”… to say nothing of, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”; the Baby Ruth bar; Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig; Larry David as George Steinbrenner; Mickey Mantle on The Tonight Show and how, in 1985, Canadian baseball changed the moment the front-running—but young—Toronto Blue Jays took three of four in September from the charging Bombers. On the first night, Tony Fernandez and Damaso Garcia collided during a routine doubleplay. I remembered watching and thinking that, even for them, being here was not like being in any other ballpark.

Before the start of Tigers-Yanks, I ate. I devoured a Hebrew National hot dog slathered in mustard and sauerkraut, and lined up at a busy Puerto Rican food stand, where a young Bronxian told me about the spring witch, and her gray skies, and how you should never marry on days like this, before bringing me chicken with plantains and beans and rice which cost less than a box of Air Canada Centre sushi.

By game time, I was bookended by two fat middle-aged women from Queens wearing florid makeup with dyed auburn hair in Derek Jeter warm-up jackets, and who leapt out of their seats with every Yankee swing. Beside them sat a family whose teenage son mouthed off to every Tiger hitter and fielder through nine innings with, alas, very little success.

Ultimately, the Yankees lost 6-4 to Kenny Rogers, then dropped the next game 6-2 to Jeremy Bonderman. But, as one fellow told me afterwards, “I don’t really start paying attention to the Yankees until August, even though I go to every game. I mean, what were they, 11 games back in May last year? All they did was win the division. Losing two to the Tigers means nothing, really.”

•–•–•

The evening after my first game, I went to the Film Forum, where a United Artists 90^th Anniversary film festival was screening. There, I met a fellow who told me that, because the Yankees have been so good for so long (Yogi Berra, himself, played 14 times in the World Series), they feel like they can do whatever they want, however they want.

He told me that, because of this, there’s been very little opposition to building the new ballpark, but “a lot of New Yorkers see this change of venue as the desecration of a shrine, and an enormous waste. With so few ballparks in the city, tearing down one field to build another doesn’t seem right. Besides, the new park is going to be bigger, but with 4,000 fewer cheap tickets. It’s all about luxury suites. This coming from an organization that already makes money hand over fist.”

Both the fan and I had gone to the festival because Jim Bouton, the Yankees pitcher from the ’60s, was going to be in attendance. During the Q&A after the movie (Bouton played a role in the Altman film The Long Goodbye, the only movie he ever made), the fan reiterated his point about the redundancy of building a new ballpark to Bouton, who agreed with his position.

But Bouton said, “Yankee Stadium has provided a lot of memories for all of us, and those can never change. In my first major league start ever, I walked seven men and gave up seven hits, but I pitched a complete game shutout. My manager, Ralph Houk, said after that, ‘If Bouton keeps pitching shutouts like that, we’re going to have to get a new bullpen.’

“Still, I remember walking in the Yankee clubhouse, and there was Mickey Mantle, making a path of towels for me from the back of the clubhouse to my locker. It was pretty special. The park is pretty special. And let’s face it, no matter where they play, the Yankees will always be special, too.”