The Stadium

Yankee Stadium officially closed for business last night and to commemorate, there was much pomp and circumstance. The living communed one more time with Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle. However, for some, this was something of an anticlimax as the Babe's House had actually been decommissioned some three decades earlier when it was closed for a major renovation. When it reopened in 1976, we were presented with a desecrated masterpiece. The idiosyncratic dimensions of the old park, like those of Fenway and the old Polo Grounds, were part and parcel of its mystique; the famous short right field porch contrasting with the eternity of left center and center, with the latter weighing in at a tidy 461 feet. That "461" sign and the likes of Mickey Mantle and Frank Howard swatting non-juiced balls beyond it were seared in one's memory.

In the new improved Stadium, a boring symmetry was in evidence and the center field fence was moved in to a more pedestrian 417 feet; surely the Babe was rolling over in his grave. Despite a steady supply of colorful and talented players, and managers, over the next decades, the magic of the House that Ruth Built was never quite the same.