Historic home nears endgame
Bronx hardball cathedral, the site of Tuesday's Midsummer Classic, hosted some of the game's greatest moments, and many of its legendary stars
"Before the game, he said he would give a year of his life if he could hit a home run in his first game in the new stadium. The Babe was on trial, and he knew it better than anybody else."
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Janet Marie Smith is in the business of preserving the past, not tearing it down. She thinks of Yankee Stadium being dismantled - dis-Marised and dis-Berraed, dis-Reggied and dis-Jetered, too - and shudders to think that Fenway Park faced a similar death sentence until it was commuted by John W. Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino.
"It's hard to imagine how to bundle that history and take it with you," said Smith, the architect of the Fenway restoration.
The first time Smith visited Yankee Stadium, site of the All-Star Game Tuesday night, was in 1979, the summer before she graduated from architecture school. Originally from Atlanta, she had grown up a National League fan.
"Yankee Stadium is monumental," she said. "Everything about it is monumental. The facade, the approach, the scale, everything about it is monumental. Yankee Stadium, even when you say it, it has such a monumental, thundering image that it conjures up.
"Fenway is the exact opposite. Fenway is very intimate. It has always been a neighborhood ballpark. Yankee Stadium has always been a destination. Our park blends in with the surroundings. Yankee Stadium always was meant to be on a pedestal. From an architectural approach, the parks are almost polar opposites. I doubt either one of them thought or looked at the other. They just were what they were.
"Yankee Stadium is a perfect paperweight."
It is a place wrapped in pinstriped memories, bestowing hardball immortality to men named Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Dickey, Berra and Ford, Mantle and Maris, Reggie and Munson, Catfish and the Goose, Rivera, Jeter, and A-Rod. Twenty-six World Series titles.
But so much more. This is the place where Knute Rockne implored Notre Dame to win one for the Gipper. Where Lou Gehrig, dying from the disease that now bears his name, called himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
Don Larsen, the imperfect man, Dick Young wrote, was perfect there. Roger Maris, hair falling out from the stress, hit his 61st home run there, breaking Babe Ruth's record.
Alan Ameche scored the touchdown in overtime for the Colts that ended the NFL's "greatest game."
Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling there, and showed Hitler that America could take a punch. Muhammad Ali fought there, and showed America that he, too, could take a punch.
Josh Gibson hit a home run so majestic - some say it left the stadium, Gibson wasn't sure - for just a moment it made people colorblind.
Billy Joel sang there. George Steinbrenner blustered there. Billy Graham preached there. Two popes prayed there. Pele made believers there. With a single pitch in the aftermath of 9/11, so, too, did President Bush.
"Losing Yankee Stadium, for baseball as a whole, makes Fenway and Wrigley even more special," said Smith, invoking the names of the only two parks left that were built before 1962, Fenway Park in 1912, Wrigley Field two years later. "My current responsibility is for protecting Fenway, which John and Tom and Larry really care about. Our stock and place in history just rose a bit."
"I'd hate to be traded to the Yankees. I don't like New York. I just don't want to play there. I wish I had a clause in my contract saying that I couldn't be traded to a club without my consent."
- Ted Williams, responding to rumors of a Williams-for-Joe DiMaggio trade
"Wake up the damn Bambino and have me face him. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass."
- Pedro Martínez, who may have pitched the best game ever against the Yankees (one hit, 17 strikeouts in 1999), but who one day would call the Yankees "my daddy."
"Mystique and Aura. Those are dancers in a nightclub."
- Curt Schilling, dismissing intangibles attributed to the Yankees in the 2001 World Series
A sportswriter named Fred Lieb was the first in print to call Yankee Stadium, "The House That Ruth Built," an edifice unlike any other when it was built in just 284 days at 161st Street and River Avenue.
"First impressions - and also last impressions - are of the vastness of the arena," the gentleman from the Times wrote on the afternoon of its opening. "The stadium is big. It towers high in the air, three tiers piled one on the other. It is a skyscraper among baseball parks. Seen from the vantage point of the nearby subway structure, the mere height of the grandstand is tremendous. Baseball fans who sat in the last row of the steeply sloping third tier may well boast that they broke all the altitude records short of those attained in an airplane."
Before construction could begin, Bob Klapisch recounts in "Yankee Stadium: The Official Retrospective," 45,000 cubic yards of earth had to be removed. The construction materials included: 3 million board feet of lumber, 20,000 yards of concrete, 800 tons of rebar, 2,300 tons of mechanical steel, 13,000 yards of topsoil, 116,000 square feet of sod, 950,000 board feet of lumber for the bleachers, and 1 million brass screws.
The signature feature of the new stadium was the copper frieze, or facade, which at the time was located on the roof overhanging the upper deck. When Yankee Stadium was renovated, a two-year project that took place in the mid-'70s, the columns that had held the upper decks in place were removed, and only a portion of the facade was preserved, moved to its outfield location. The vast outfield dimensions, especially in center field, were also reduced, and later reduced again.
Until Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert built a new playground for Ruth, the game's biggest drawing card, baseball nines played in parks or on grounds. This was a stadium, built on a scale intended to conjure visions of antiquity's great sporting venues. It was the new world's Colosseum, though Rome's amphitheater lasted nearly five centuries. Yankee Stadium, when it shutters at the end of this season, will have expired at age 85, to be replaced by a replica next door adorned with all the 21st-century necessities: more luxury boxes, party suites, a "great hall" for shopping and eating, $2,000 premium seats.
What it won't have are the ghosts.
Ruth disappointed no one, least of all himself. He did, indeed, become the first Yankee to hit a home run in the new stadium, with the governor, Al Smith, and the bandleader, John Philip Sousa, among the 60,000 or so crowded inside, with another 15,000 or so unable to enter. Baseball's colossus, purchased away from the Red Sox, now had a grand stage to call his own - with its inviting 295-foot dimensions down the right-field line and reachable fences in the right-field alley, this was as much the house built for Ruth as the other way around.
Ruth's first Yankee Stadium homer came against the Red Sox, and a righthander named Howard Ehmke. Fitting that it should come against the Sox. Without Ruth, Ruppert's vision for a new ballpark surely would have been more modest. Without the Sox, the Yankees would not have had a tailor-made foil.
"I never did well there. The Yankees those years, they always beat us. It was dog eat dog. It was a great place to play. Very loud. I always liked playing there. I could have signed with the Yankees. I was very much in demand when I was 17 years old. But Mother liked the Red Sox."
- former Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky
"I was in a bad position, on my knees, and all of a sudden his elbows are in my head. Then he started kickin' and whalin', so I hit him."
- former Sox catcher Carlton Fisk, describing the 1976 brawl started by a home plate collision with Yankees outfielder Lou Piniella
"There are two places that I've played in my entire career that you can actually feel momentum change. Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. You can actually feel it change."
- Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, reflecting on the Game 7 loss in the 2003 ALCS
First and foremost, the Red Sox lost here in epic fashion - until they won.
Two games left in the 1949 season, the Sox ahead by a game, Joe DiMaggio ravaged by pneumonia, Boston's best two pitchers, Mel Parnell and Ellis Kinder, ready to close out the Bombers. The Yankees won both games and the pennant. Tom Yawkey, who owned the Sox at the time, did not set foot in Yankee Stadium for another 19 years.
Sox fans watched Roger Clemens, one of their own, wipe sweat from his brow onto Ruth's forehead on his monument beyond the center-field fence, then win his first World Series ring as a Yankee there. They watched Wade Boggs mounting a police officer's horse after winning his first World Series, also while wearing pinstripes.
Aaron Boone's home run off Wakefield in Game 7 in 2003 is almost too fresh to qualify as a memory, though Grady Little is destined never to forget.
And while the Sox were losing, they also were fighting. In 1938, before a crowd of 83,533, largest in Yankee Stadium history, Sox player-manager Joe Cronin fights Yankees outfielder Jake Powell under the stands; both players are suspended 10 days. In 1967, a Yankee pitcher named Thad Tillotson hits Joe Foy in the head with a pitch. Sox pitcher Jim Lonborg retaliates, hitting Tillotson, and the benches empty. Rico Petrocelli's brother, a cop in the Bronx, helps to restore order. In 1976, Piniella runs over Fisk, the benches empty again, and Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles throws Sox pitcher Bill Lee to the ground. Lee misses two months with a bad shoulder.
And then they won, bloody sock and all, in 2004, and Yankee Stadium became hallowed ground for the Sox and their fans, too.
"I went to Yankee Stadium when the Padres went to the World Series in 1998. By then I had moved from managing partner to just a limited partner but was very proud of the team and the squad, which I had helped put together. Anyway, I am wearing my SD hat and a Yankee fan comes up to me and starts shoving me - in front of a cop, no less. I say to the guy, 'Relax,' and he tells me we are in New York. I say to him, 'Thanks for the tip.' He now pushes me really hard. I walk up to the cop and say, 'Can you give me some help, officer?' The cop says to me, 'You're lucky he didn't take a swing at you.' That made winning the American League pennant in Yankee Stadium all the sweeter six years later."
- Sox chairman Tom Werner
"One memory: celebrating Game 7 in 2004. The Yankees showed a lot of class in keeping the field lights on for an extended period."
- Sox majority owner John W. Henry
"Hell Freezes Over"
- Headline in New York Post after the Sox beat the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS
And then it will be gone. Copied, but never duplicated. On Sept. 21, the Yankees will play the Baltimore Orioles in their final regular-season home game. That will be the last game to be played in Yankee Stadium, unless the Yankees make the playoffs and bid for one more glorious October.
Could it have been preserved, like Fenway? Smith won't touch that one.
"I don't know enough about what's in their heads," she said. "Maybe I don't want to know.
"The new park gives them opportunities for revenue from premium seating, club suites, all the things teams look for to fund a competitive team on the field. From that perspective, it makes our job that much harder, to find a way to keep up with the Joneses in such a small park."
She was not asked to participate in the new Yankee Stadium project.
"I feel such a keen sense of joy and satisfaction from having saved this one from the brink," she said, "that I'm pleased not to have been put in what would have been a difficult position."
Gordon Edes can be reached at edes@globe.com.
