August 2008

Call it heresy, call what you want but I don't mourn the old stadium giving way to the new. I love old Yankee stadium, but it has been changed too many times to be a cathedral as some like to say, or a museum which is the forever fate of Fenway and Wrigley. Yankee stadium is a battle field, hallowed ground. And so I only mourn that the field is moving. I want to know there is a little of Thurman Munson's blood still in the dirt around home plate, that when a rookie center fielder takes the field for the first time they are standing in Joe D's foot prints, or that when I look out on the picket fence, I can image what a blast it must have been when Micky hit one off it, almost clearing the park boundaries.

I am sure the new Yankee stadium with be a place of epic pendant races, tremendous come backs and post season glory. But late at night when the bright lights are out and the Harlem river slips along silent and black in the dead of the night, the Babe's ghost will be rounding first and tipping his cap to a crowd long departed this earth in the little league field across the street from the new Yankee stadium.