Sunday in the Park with LiC
The New York Yankees are playing their last game at the old Yankee Stadium today. I’m not a fan of the team (though having them around as the bad guy makes baseball a lot more fun), but I’m a fan of history and it saddens me a little to see them moving a few doors down to a new stadium with more expensive seats and plenty of corporate luxury suites for people who think so little of the game they want to be as insulated from it as possible.
On a trip to New York a few years ago, my good friend Joel and I made a point of spending a September evening at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Today, I’m especially glad we did.
Alas, this is a movie blog not a sports blog so lets mark this day in history with a cinematic recreation of another day in history nearly 70 years ago. Here is a clip of Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees:
Filed under: Clips
Tags: Gary Cooper, Pride of the Yankees
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As a diehard and lifelong fanatical Yankee fan, who spent more than a little of my focus through the years on the performance of the beloved Bronx Bombers, I have a bittersweet feeling today, and nearly tried to get tickets. But alas I am not willing to mortgage my house to acquire them. My oldest daughter Melanie (12) is following in the family tradition and religiously follows every game, as I had done for decades. I have a 59 year-old cousin, who continues to devote his life to them, but this year has been a rude awakening for most of us, with a playoff birth all but impossible, for the first time in many years.
I imagine I have been to about 70 games at Yankee Stadium through the years, but I will admit I moved away from that expensive practice in recent years, even though my fairview, New Jersey home is barely 15 minutes by car from The House That Ruth Built. Having held season tickets to the New York Islanders at Nassau Colisum for eight years, duing their multiple Stanley Cup run, I think I can at least fathom what season ticket holders at Yankee Stadium have had to endure to keep their dream alive and insure they are at the big event.
My favorite players that I’ve watched include Roy White, Bernie Williams, Greg Nettles, Thurman Munson (rest in peace), Don Mattingly, Mariano Rivera, Mel Stottlemyre, Bobby Murcer (rest in peace) and Derek Jeter, but when I was VERY young I watched the great Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford.
And I once had the unique experience as a summer airport limousine driver to escort Phil “Holy Cow” Rizzuto to his Hillside, New Jersey home from Newark, and the conversation we had will forever be unforgettable, even if as a fellow Italian-American, I was sitting pretty from the start!
Goodbye Yankee Stadium, the memories we’ve had there (and Craig and Joel have experienced its magic too) will be with us till our own dying days.
Ironically, Derek Jeter in the past few days has broken the career Yankee Stadium hit record of the man who is the centerpiece of that tearful clip that Craig has provided us from that beloved movie classic, that some of us have watched well over a hundred times in our lives.
We usher in the new Stadium with excitement and anticipation for sure,(and a little disgust too, as Craig rightly points out) but there will never be anything to replace the building where our prayers were answered with more than a little regularity.
Thanks for sending us this love letter from LA. Today we mourn the end of an era and our tears will flow freely.
that was awesome Sam. Thanks for sharing that.
Baseball is all about history and continuity so even though the stadium was already remodeled in 1973, this just feels weird…even for an outsider such as myself.
Although baseball isn’t as much America’s pasttime as it used to be, the Yankees and their stadium are probably the most well-known icons we have of the sport — in fact, any American sport. Indeed, the Yankees have been “America’s team” more than any other.
Nothing is forever, but we have the images preserved on film of the Yankees and their legendary home field.
Thanks for the memories, Craig and Sam.
The bad guys of baseball? Fie on you, Craig.
Sorry, Sam and Alison, but I pledged my allegiance, temporarily at least, to the Red Sox during my college days at BU, when I lived next to and for a short time worked at Fenway Park. Of course the curse was still alive at that point so it was still fun to root for the underdog. Naturally, then, now I find myself quietly cheering for the Rays to become the fresh new AL East powerhouse team, partly because they’re small-market savvy like my hometown Twins.
This has little to do with Yankee Stadium, of course. I should have made a trip to a game during the many chances I had…
It just doesn’t feel right.
Come on Alison, the Yankees thrive on being the bad guys!