It’s my home. I’m a boy of summer. We go back 29 years, Yankee Stadium and I. My dead father is there; also a marvelous woman, my fourth grade teacher. And two or three very young ladies who shared hands with me in that mountainside of an upper deck: courtship and innocence, they were compatible then. I can remember Joe D. slicking after line drives on his private oiled track in center field; a bank teller doesn’t snap off hundreds with more assurance. And Mantle, thunderous yet fragile. His speed broke the spirit of fly balls; his presence browbeat them down. One twi-nighter in 1961 I saw Maris mail off four home runs: each was a penstroke and gone; above, somewhere in the Perseid meteor shower, there might have been shooting stars as ephemeral, as lovely. It was—it is—the one place where I have no ornate, hand-carved persona. Healthy, that: to be, now and then, just one innominate pointillist dot in a grand seascape of heads.
They’ve rebuilt it: with great affection. The poles are gone that once interrupted a ground ball from bat to second base. Tight seats have been let out; escalators added. Now there is an instant-replay scoreboard; drive-in movie screens don’t come much larger. Here tintype portraits of Roy White and Chris Chambliss will flash up; they resemble negatives in copper plate, the kind that a printer might use. Death Valley, left-center field—467 impossible feet away three years ago—has been cheated in somewhat. And right field, Babe Ruth’s custom-made porch—an all-too-possible 296 feet away—has been cheated back somewhat. Still, it’s the same place. A section of 1923 Beaux Arts façade has been retained. The Stadium, unlike eunuchoid, geometrical Shea Stadium, is huge yet intimate. Yet eccentric: a ball park, as a golf course, should be different, peculiar. Ghosts of fifty years’ competition will flit at ease here. That, too, is healthy. We are, it has been our nature, a competitive people. We cherish the history of our wars.
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