GOODBYE TO YANKEE STADIUM

They have played their last game in Yankee Stadium.
By next year they will be playing in a new stadium and the old one will be obsolete.
This is not new in American life. Every day it seems we are faced with what we know and loved going away. We are faced with the mortality of life and everything associated with it.

Yankee Stadium is one of the oldest sports stadiums in the country, but yet we do not think of it in the same way we think of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field to name a few. When it comes to these ballparks we tend to see them as relics of the past. We have come to associate them with the glorious achievements of yesteryear.
When we look at Fenway Park we can still see Ted Williams running around the bases and daring not tipping his cap. When we look at Wrigley we can still see the likes of Ernie Banks. We can still see Ron Santo in all of his youth.
But the same can never be said of Yankee Stadium, for even though we are all familiar with the images from the black and white newsreel films, we instead think of Yankee Stadium as being in color. As being in high-definition.
When we think of Yankee Stadium we might know the past but we are definitely more familiar with the Here and Now. The names of Jeter, ARod, Joba, and Mariano mean something. These names represent the hope and promise of youth. They remind us that it is a little boy’s game after all.

***** ***** *****
In 1969, Yankee Stadium played host to Mickey Mantle Day.
It was the day that the great Yankee star said goodbye and as he stood on the field in front of a microphone wearing not a baseball uniform but a business suit he told the crowd that he could never understand how a man who knew he was going to die could say he was the luckiest man in the world. Now though he added, he could understand and he fully appreciated the words spoken by the late Lou Gehrig.

Now as the ballplayers leave the field for the last time and as the hot dog vendors disappear into a summer’s night, we can understand what Mickey Mantle meant. We can understand how privilege he felt wearing those Yankee pinstripes for we all felt privilege just watching him.
We felt this way because by rooting for the Yankees we were taking part in the American experience. An experience which span generations and told a tale which was truly reflective of our culture. All that is good, and sometimes even all that is bad.
But never once did we stop rooting.
Never once did we want it all to end.
For we were happy to be a part of it all.
We did feel as lucky as those ballplayers in pinstripes.

THE END