I guess you know that you’re getting old when they start to tear down the baseball stadiums that were built in your own lifetime, presumably because they are considered too decrepit for a major league team and its fans.
In case you didn’t know – or perhaps don’t even care – this is the last season both the Yankees and Mets will play in their current stadiums. Next year they will each have brand new state-of-the-art homes worthy of teams whose average player makes more than $3-million, the stars much more.
OK, maybe I don’t actually remember when Yankee Stadium was completed in 1923. After all, I was only 1 year old then, but gosh, I was already a grown man of 44 when the Mets played their first game at Shea Stadium in 1964. I guess we don’t build our stadiums to last for the ages the way the Romans did.
Frankly, I won’t miss Shea Stadium. I’ve been to a lot of games at Shea and I have some fond memories of the place, particularly of the times I went with my grandson Nathaniel when he was a small boy. However, except for a few good seasons, the Mets never really made baseball history there. Heck, in all those years they never even had a single no-hitter. So maybe it’s fitting that when they move next door to their new stadium they won’t even bother taking the name with them and instead they’ll call the place CitiField in recognition of the $20 million the bank of the same name anted up for the honor.
Yankee Stadium, of course, is another matter. Fortunately the Yankees will take the name along to their new home field. And they will also load the plaques and sculptures in Monument Park that honor past great players and managers on the moving van. That site, which has become something of a shrine to many Yankee fans, will be relocated to the new stadium under a restaurant where the prices will probably be more than the average fan can afford.
However, no matter how hard they try to preserve the mystique of the old Yankee Stadium, the new one will never be the same. For that matter, even the Yankee Stadium they’re leaving behind wasn’t quite the same as the original one after it’s major renovation in the 1970s. But it was still basically the fabled "House that Ruth built," the place where more baseball records were made and shattered than you can shake a stick at. Since its opening in 1923 it has been the scene of 37 of the 84 World Series played in that span, it’s the place where Babe Ruth hit his memorable 60th home run in 1927, where Roger Maris topped that with 61 in 1961, where Joe DiMaggio began his still unequaled 56-game hitting streak, where Don Larsen pitched a perfect game, the only no-hitter in World Series history… the list of records made and broken at Yankee Stadium is too long to continue here.
Yankee Stadium is also the place where, in 1939, Lou Gehrig, one of the team’s greatest players, told the fans in a farewell speech that because of their loyalty he considered himself "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth" even though he had been diagnosed with fatal ALS. Its where, in 1928, during a football game there between Notre Dame and Army, Knute Rockne delivered his famous "Win one for the Gipper" halftime pep talk. Its where, in 1936, Max Schemling, hailed by Hitler as a symbol of Nazi Germany’s superiority, knocked out Joe Louis in the 12th round and where two years later an aroused Louis destroyed Schemling in the first round. Jack Dempsey fought there. Billy Joel sang there. Bill Graham preached there. And three Popes, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, have held Mass there.
When the current Yankee Stadium is abandoned by the boys in pinstripes who made it famous, the last of the baseball fields on which the heroes of my youth once played will be gone from New York City. Ebbets Field where Jackie Robinson made history in 1947 by becoming the first African American to play in the Major Leagues, the Polo Grounds, where Bobby Thomson hit "the shot heard ’round the world" were deserted and demolished in the 1950s when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left for sunny California.
Today there are only two Major League ball parks left that can be termed "classic", Wrigley Field in Chicago with its ivy covered wall, and Fenway Park in Boston with its famous "Green Monster," the high, green painted left field wall that challenges the batters. I’ve been to Wrigley a number of times but for some reason I’ve never been to Fenway. Maybe there’s still time. If I hurry.
