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GUESS AGAIN!
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Fond farewells to Yankee
and Shea stadiums due
of TheColumnists.com
There’s no
crying in baseball, right? That’s what Tom Hanks said in
“A League of Their Own.”
Yeah, then why did thousands cry when the Mets blew the 2007
pennant with the worst choke since a mob guy took a pal in the
backyard for a supposed hug.
Why did Yankee fans line up outside the Stadium last fall when
the team failed to get into the World Series for the fourth straight
year and tear their hair out. Joe Torre disappeared after that
and the new manager, Northwestern Joe Girardi, honor graduate
of the Big Ten School, became the new Joe.
There was even crying opening day at Yankee Stadium when there
was no game because of a rain out. No kidding.
A new Yankee Stadium is rising across the street in the Bronx
from where the old one has stood since 1923. Babe Ruth homered
that day and it was soon called the House That Ruth Built.
There have been 39 pennants and 26 World Series wins there and
enough memories to fill the Grand Canyon.
Nostalgia is as good a part of baseball as a grand slam homer.
Now I have a chance to think again of a couple of the memories
I experienced in more than 60 years around the Stadium.
A cousin of mine, Harry Eisenstat, pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers,
Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Indians back in the 1930s and 1940s.
One day he offered us tickets for a game at the Stadium. My mother
accepted the offer and asked where the tickets would be left.
“In the booth near third base,” Eisenstat told her.
“Where’s third base?” my mother asked.
I saw Joe DiMaggio get a couple of those hits in his 56 games
in 1941 and I saw Mickey Mantle get a lot of those huge home
runs after he joined the team in 1951.
I invited a couple of Yankee pitchers over to my home for a barbecue
in 1972 and they enjoyed the franks, hamburgers and beer. Before
I knew it the pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich, had also
arranged to swap wives, kids, cars and houses. I really had nothing
to do with it. Anyway, it became a pretty significant Yankee
memory for me, if not a particular Yankee Stadium memory.
Chris Chambliss hit that famous home run in 1976 to give the
Yankees their first pennant in a dozen years and Reggie Jackson
hit those three home runs in that last game of the 1977 Series.
You can catch that at your local video store by asking for the
film version of “The Bronx is Burning.”
Joe Torre came along in 1996, won four World Series with the
Yankees, put up an amazing mark of a dozen straight playoff years
and walked the plank last October. The Yankees haven’t won
a Series since 2000 and haven’t been in one since 2003.
You bet there is crying.
So the Stadium of Ruth, Lou Gehrig, DiMaggio, Whitey Ford and
Yogi Berra will see the hammer and the anvil next April as the
new Stadium opens. The building will be gone but the field and
the grass will actually be saved for high school kids to show
their skills.
You can bet there will be lots of crying there when some high
school pitcher does a Ralph Branca and comes in to give up a
winning city championship homer.
Across town, there is another new stadium going up, something
called Citi Field where the Mets will play starting in 2009.
The Yankees wouldn’t sell naming rights, to their credit,
while the Mets collected some $20 million to put the name of
a bank on a ball park, a horrible, common trait.
This ball park will be smaller than Shea Stadium, which opened
in 1964, and will include a rotunda similar to the famous one
in Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. At least they will call it the
Jackie Robinson rotunda in tribute to the historic heroism of
six decades ago when Robinson broke the color barrier.
Casey Stengel managed the Mets in their first game in that new
Shea Stadium in Queens and was proud of the new place his battered
team was playing in.
“The best thing about it,” said Stengel, who was 74
years old at the time, “is that it has 54 bath rooms.”
So New York will see two new baseball stadiums in 2009 as Yankee
Stadium and Shea finish out their history at the end of this
season.
You can bet there will be a lot of crying on those days.
How do I know?
I haven’t stopped crying over the closure of Ebbets Field
more than 50 years ago.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips
Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. This column first posted April 7, 2008.
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