Yankee Stadium
Did you read all the stories in the "New York Times" about the last game there?
Well, not the last game, but the experience celebrities had at the ballpark? More specifically, Paul Simon?
Where have you gone Paul Simon, a nation turns its distracted eyes to you. You made one of the great solo albums of all time, even worked with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm section, and now all you’re remembered for is a couple of tunes with Art Garfunkel and a record with African rhythms.
"Kodachrome"’s success overshadowed the greatness of "Something So Right", "Learn How To Fall", "St. Judy’s Comet" and my personal favorite, "One Man’s Ceiling Is Another Man’s Floor". Barry Beckett’s fingers walk down the keyboard like a man meandering down an apartment building stairway… Maybe running back up at the end for something forgotten. Like this album. Not hard enough for the classic rock stations, not hip enough to be played in wine bars, "There Goes Rhymin’ Simon" is Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak, everything in 1941, almost nothing today.
But this remembrance wasn’t about Paul’s music, but his experiences at Yankee Stadium. Like singing "Mrs. Robinson" at the installation of DiMaggio’s monument. Meeting people who were friends whom he’d never encountered. Like Scooter Rizzuto.
Turns out Paul Simon was a helluva baseball player. All Queens, well almost. I lived to play baseball. Every day. I considered myself to be pretty good. But that was before the Beatles. Before the Beatles, we all wanted to be Mickey Mantle.
My father took me to Yankee Stadium for the very first time in 1961. You couldn’t find a less athletic chap. He bought us both gloves when I was four or five, but I don’t remember him ever being better than me. But that glove and that ball were my start. To my own journey, outside the house. Playing in pickup games, making friends down the street.
The first game we went to was a doubleheader. Yogi slapped a single in the 14th for the Yankees to win. We left after the fifth inning of the second game, we had to meet my mother, who was going to a play in Manhattan.
The next time my mom came with us. To Old Timer’s Day.
My father getting us tickets to Old Timer’s Day was like you taking your kids to see Zeppelin, or AC/DC. I barely knew who all these players were, but my dad knew the day was special. He focused on food, a patron spilled a Ballantine all over him, I watched what happened on the field.
But the most memorable visit to the ballpark came on October 1st.
This time he brought the whole family.
It was the last day of the season, of an epic year. And even though the pennant was sewn up, the mighty Maris reached back and popped one into the right field stands. For his 61st home run.
Roger Maris is a name for the history books. With an asterisk. A sixties relic deep in the memory banks of those who lived through the era, but unknown to the younger generation, like a second rate British Invasion act, like the Nashville Teens.
I’m not nostalgic for this stadium. It’s a fake. The seventies remake killed the charisma.
What about those poles? What if you were sitting behind one?
I wouldn’t go up to the upper deck at first. Weren’t those seats just bolted to the wall, with your feet dangling?
And the monuments in center. What if someone ran into them?
I remember more than one inside the park home run where the ball got caught back there. It was 451 feet to deep center. Or was it 454?
They don’t make them like that anymore.
But at least they don’t make them all symmetrical, like the seventies remake.
I’m hoping the new Yankee Stadium has character, some of the uniqueness of the old. Baseball parks don’t change, they’re not subject to fashion, you build them and they remain, frozen in time, a modern team playing in a bygone era.
You could feel the history in the old Yankee Stadium. This was where the Babe played. Born in 1896, growing up in an orphanage in Baltimore. This was where Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 games in a row, not to be in the record books, but because it was his job. This was where I spent some of my closest moments with my dad. Who went for me. Because he wasn’t a narcissistic he-man of the universe, but a father, who wanted better for his kids, who wanted them to have what he didn’t.
