THIS isn’t just about the weepy pilgrims who buy the tickets, who fill Yankee Stadium day after day, who’ve been taking extra-long looks around the old ballpark this summer, staying long after the final pitch, traffic be damned, lest they fail to absorb with their eyes and their memories every last detail of the place.
2008 All-Star Game Special Section
Schedule of All-Star Activities
This isn’t just about those of us up in the press box, the proprietors of purple poetry, who fall over each other emptying our thesauruses of all their adjectives in an attempt to perfectly portray the star of tomorrow night’s festivities, which has also happened to be the star of the whole sport for 85 years.
No, this is – and always has been – about the way the wonderment fills the souls of the players who come here. These are professionals, millionaires, cooler than Fonzie, all of them, and yet all of them, to a man, react the same way, and have for years, for decades, for damn near a century, every time they see it for the first time.
“I had to go out and pay my respects, because I think that’s what you’re supposed to do when you visit a holy place,” Tony Gwynn said late in afternoon of Oct. 16, 1998, the day before his SanDiego Padres would play the Yankees in the World Series. “It’s the right thing to do.”
To that point, Gwynn had already amassed close to 2,900 hits, he’d already won eight batting titles, he’d already hit close to .340 across 17 major league seasons, had already punched his ticket to the Hall of Fame. And he didn’t care that it seemed that he was genufl ecting in the enemy’s church.Because it was Yankee Stadium, a secular basilica that is truly ecumenical, welcoming people of all stripes and backgrounds and rooting interests – and always has.
This was where Babe Ruth played and where Whitey Ford pitched – and also where Josh Gibson played and Satchel Paige pitched. Long before baseball was integrated, Yankee Stadium sure was.
Gibson remains the only man to ever hit a fair ball out beyond the property line. Paige, pitching in 1941, was asked by Stanley Frank, the sports columnist of this newspaper, what playing here meant to him. His answer was simple and it was eloquent and it was pure Paige.
“Everything,” Ol’ Satch said. Now, it is true the stadium that will close its doors for good on Sept. 21 (barring a second-half Yankee playoff surge) doesn’t much resemble the one that shuttered following an 8-5 loss to the Tigers on Sept. 30, 1973. The frieze that once ringed the entire grandstand, providing the most ominous and elegant backdrop in the history of American sport, had vanished by the time the park re-opened in 1976, a victim to the addition of new lighting and the removal of a full roof.
There is a facsimile that has sat these last 32 years above the bleachers, but it isn’t nearly the same. And the dimensions? Goodness, the dimensions.
In 2008, it remains shocking to walk into a ballpark and see a power alley sitting 399 feet from home plate, the way Alex Rodriguez’s prime power target sits out there. At a time when there are places like Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia where the same spot of the ballpark sits a mere 374 feet away, it’s as if the Yankees and their righthanded hitters play their games with a degree of difficulty attached.
And still there are oldtimers who walk in the place, see that number – “399” – and shake their heads. Joe DiMaggio, attending one of the last Old-Timer’s Days of his life in 1996, said that day, “I’d have given a year’s salary if someone had pushed the fence in that far in my day.”
Joe D. was probably exaggerating. Or was he? During his day, that power alley – forever dubbed “Death Valley” – sat 457 feet away from home plate. Center field was 461 feet away, so far that they actually planted concrete monuments out there. And even that was a concession not available when the place opened
in 1923, when dead center was 490 feet away. So, no, the place doesn’t look the same, inside or out. To see what it used to look like, you need access to old home movies, or old scrapbooks, or old movies, like “The FBI Story,” in which Jimmy Stewart stalks a bad guy during a football game, or “Serpico,” where there’s a great shot of the Stadium in the background of a scene on a Bronx hill in which some of the dirty cops try to get Al Pacino to share in their shakedowns.
Doesn’t matter. The address is the same. The patch of Bronx earth on which the players will trod in this All-Star Game is the same one that they marched on during the 1939 Mid-Summer Classic. That fact always seems to get to the players, too.
“Every time I walk out to right fi eld, I think the same thing,” Paul O’Neill said in 2000, the eighth of his nine seasons patrolling that sacred piece of real estate. “I think, ‘This is where Babe Ruth played. Right here. This very spot.’ Babe Ruth, man. What other place gives you that?”
No other place does, not in baseball anyway. This is the star. This is the featured attraction. They say Hollywood has no room for older stars now? New York City does. She’s 85 years young.
And beautiful as ever.