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April 2, 2008 The First LastOpening Day at Yankee Stadium
On Monday, what was to be Yankee Stadium's first-ever March game was canceled when the weather forecast didn't promise that the Yankees and Blue Jays could get in the requisite five innings for an official game. While this led to a fair amount of grumbling and booing by the fans who'd trekked out in a cold drizzle to catch the 2008 opener, it couldn't be argued that the 30-hour postponement didn't make for better baseball-playing and -watching conditions. The rains that assailed New York City off and on overnight and throughout the day on Tuesday gave way to perfect spring conditions in the evening: sixty-odd degrees and dry at game time. The big story of the night was the historic final Opening Day of the House That Ruth Built, one of a litany of lasts that will run at least through September 21 against the Orioles (the Yankees' final scheduled regular season home game) and perhaps be stretched even farther should the Bronx Bombers manage to make it to the playoffs for the 14th straight year. We can look forward to these "historic" markers growing increasingly absurd as the year wears on, with broadcasters encouraging fans to catch the historic final midweek series against the Rays in July, and in August alerting us to Carl Pavano's historic final trip to the Yankee Stadium Trainers' Room. (I can almost hear Suzyn Waldman reverently running down the historic implications of the latter event: "Should Pavano somehow stay with the Yankees next year, and need a cortisone shot, or a rub down, or a precautionary X-Ray, it will be at the new Yankee Stadium.") Of course, there will be an audience for all the sentimentality that's being unleashed with the Stadium's send-off. In a sport that conscientiously markets itself on its past and its traditions, the Yankees trade most effectively in nostalgia. Possibly the greatest achievement of the Yankees' nostalgia machine is the perceived continuity between the building that Colonel Ruppert built in 1923 to house Babe Ruth's bat and the current Yankee Stadium. The 1976 "renovation" was more of a gut-and-rebuild job than a simple sprucing up of the structure. Just about every significant detail of the building--its dimensions, the playing field, the seats, the scoreboard--was altered, resulting in an arena that doesn't fit in with the great classic ballparks like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, but doesn't quite have the plastic uniformity of the cookie-cutter parks of the '60s and '70s, either. Although many still admire its timeless look, Yankee Stadium II (as we sometimes like to call the post-1976 structure) shares little with the original other than its address. Across the street, the new new Yankee Stadium looks a bit like the Death Star, circa Return of the Jedi, enough so that I half-expect it to sprout a laser cannon and vaporize the present stadium sometime after the last pitch of the 2008 season is thrown. Its still-under-construction exterior shell self-consciously recalls the original structure, but the ballpark within will be thoroughly modern and built from scratch-there's no longer any plausible deniability that this isn't a break with history. Talking to fans around the ballpark, the recurring theme was anxiety about the new ballpark. Will they be able to afford tickets? Will they be near the other regular ticket plan holders in their section? Will the new Stadium be the same kind of place the old one was? Not all of Yankee fans' sense of ennui is induced by the team's marketing department. George Steinbrenner came into his own as the team's owner right around the time that Yankee Stadium II opened, which was coordinated with his return from his first baseball suspension. Over the last few years, as Yankee Stadium's days have become numbered, there's been a rising awareness that Steinbrenner's days are numbered, also. In the fifth inning of the opener, Steinbrenner was called to the stage to make a brief video-screen appearance, pulling a slot machine-style lever that reduced a "Games Left in Yankee Stadium" counter from 81 to 80. The moment was sad, not because we're one game closer to end of the line for the old ballpark, but because of the vacant look in Steinbrenner's eyes as he pulled the lever. The Stadium's mortality has become entwined with the owner's mortality with an apocalyptic edge--the end of either may not be the end of the Yankees, but the end of both will certainly mark the end of an era. Like the ballpark across the street, Steinbrenner's son Hank looks like a reasonable facsimile of an early version of the original. Just as there's uncertainty about the new ballpark, however, there's uncertainty about the new Boss: uncertainty about the future. Some notes about the game, a 3-2 Yankees win:
Derek Jacques is an author of Baseball Prospectus. 0 comments have been left for this article.
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