The House That Ruth Did Not Build

"Then the night turned cold, colder than the moon. The stars were white as bones. The stadium was old -- older than the screams, older than the teams. There were three men down and the season lost and the tarpaulin was rolled upon the winter frost." -- Paul Simon

Last Saturday afternoon, I paid my first visit to the new ballpark where the New York Yankees play their home games. I can't verbally call it (and won't refer to it in print as) "Yankee Stadium," which should give you an idea of how I feel about the place.

That sounds a little cruel. The Yankees' new home is a beautiful -- no, downright stunning -- ballpark. Photos of Yankees legends are plastered everywhere, most notably in the Great Hall (where soaring thirty-foot high banners portray the greats in black-and-white on one side and color on the other). The fair portions of the field are the same dimesions, even down to the short porch in right. The exterior is resplendent with gold leaf and shining white limestone and cathedral windows and looks like Yankee Stadium did before its 1975 renovation. The facade crowns the seats instead of the scoreboard and Monument Park has been restored to center field, just as they looked in 1923. Most of the dirt was carted over from across the street, so today's Yankees technically play on the same soil that Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle did. The new ballpark is perfect, but nevertheless, it didn't feel right. I spent three hours sitting in a seat that's technically mine but felt nothing like my beloved Section 9, surrounded by forty thousand strong while a majestic deserted ballpark quietly rotted a few hundred feet away. I cheered and chanted and enjoyed the game, but I was always acutely aware that Yankee Stadium is supposed to sit on the opposite side of 161st Street.

The architects and designers of the new stadium tried VERY hard to pay homage to the history of the Yankees, but at best it all seems a bit cartoonish and at worst it feels like a slap in the face. To illustrate the former, consider that the foul territory has been cut in half to bring expensive seats closer to the diamond, the cathedral-esque exterior hides a shopping concourse, the gleaming white facade hangs over "cheap seats" that have been halved in quantity, and Monument Park is hidden under a corporate-branded sports bar.

I'll use a longer example to illustrate that slap in the face. When Thurman Munson, the famed catcher and former captain of the Yankees, died halfway through the 1979 season, none of his teammates could bring themselves to clean out and reassign his locker. It sat in the clubhouse untouched, looking exactly as it had the last time Munson hung up his jersey, for the remainder of that season... and the season after that and the season after that. For the next thirty years, Munson's locker was only disturbed for cleaning; the clubhouse was renovated around it, lockers were assigned and deserted and reassigned without heed to it, and subsequent Yankees captains were relocated to the locker next to Munson's. It was a private tribute made and maintained by those who shared a special bond with Munson, whether by friendship or by the ties of pinstripes. But when the Yankees moved across the street after the 2008 season, Munson's locker had to be moved as well.

The current captain of the Yankees dresses next to an empty locker before every home game, but it's not Munson's. The space adjacent to Derek Jeter's locker stands empty as a tribute to all lost legends... while Munson's locker stands upstairs in a museum, encased in glass, visible to fifty thousand people a day.

It's a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with the stadium itself. My Yankee Stadium, with its rickety frame and uncomfortable seats and peeling paint and quirks and nuances and undeniable baseball magic, has been replaced with a Stepford Wife fascimile and put on display for the world to gawk at. The Yankee Stadium I called home may not have had cathedral windows, but I worshipped there for fifteen years, poured hundreds of prayers into those walls, and emerged with just as many secrets and divine inclinations.

I'll get used to it eventually. I'll keep going to the games, and as my time spent in section 211 starts to approach my time spent in Section 9, I'll start to build a new set of memories to cherish and a new set of prayers to live by. But last Saturday, for the first time in my life, I sat in Yankee Stadium and felt homeless.