Earlier this week, baseball said goodbye to one of its most revered – and certainly its most reviled – ballparks, New York’s Yankee Stadium.
In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that here at Fine Day Industries, there as an institutional bias against the New York Yankees. A strong institutional bias. In fact, one might safely call it a hatred. Just the same, it is impossible not to respect the history that has unfolded in that ballpark (the date October 20, 2004 comes to mind). It is impossible not to be in awe of the legends of the game – many of whom are legends even among legends – who have called Yankee Stadium home in the years since it opened in 1923.
Loath though we are to admit it, there is even a perverse pleasure in the fact that the Yankees were able to bid The Stadium farewell in victory. In the interest of stating what is by now the obvious, it should be noted that the notion of “pleasure” here owes a great debt to the fact that the mighty Yankees have fallen, missing baseball’s postseason for the first time since...well, ever in the careers of Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, and Jorge Posada. That is a glorious thing, worthy of a beer in itself – whether to revel in their fall, or to applaud their run of greatness. With the Yankees but a footnote to the 2008 season, though, it's a painless concession to accept that Yankee Stadium receive a sendoff – for one day, anyway – befitting its illustrious past.
That past began on April 18, 1923 – against the Boston Red Sox no less – when Babe Ruth “smash[ed] a savage home run,” as the New York Times put it, in the ballpark’s inaugural game. “And that was the real baptism of Yankee Stadium.” World Series titles followed. Lots of them. Just ask any Yankees fan. They’ll tell you how many. Some even like to imply that they played some part in all that success. They are, one hopes, a boisterous minority.
Yankee Stadium ceased to be The House That Ruth Built, in any aesthetic sense, after a major renovation that bumped the Yankees to Shea Stadium for the 1974 and 1975 seasons. Even in its subsequent altered state, though, Yankee Stadium continued to be home to baseball history. It will be missed. Not by anyone currently in the employ of It’s A Fine Day For A Beer, mind you. But it will certainly be missed – so we honor its 85 years of baseball.
As one of baseball’s grand old parks recedes into history, though, we celebrate the breaking of ground on this day in 1911 on the site that would become Fenway Park. Most famously described by John Updike (in The New Yorker, naturally) as “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” Fenway is baseball’s oldest living ballpark and surely its quirkiest. Updike’s 1960 essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” continues:
Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.
As Updike captures the rugged poetry of the park, Boston’s most beloved (or perhaps not) baseball scribe, Dan Shaughnessy, expresses the simple wonder of losing one’s Fenway virginity in his 1996 book At Fenway:
The best entrance to the open-air Fenway yard is the portal just to the right of home plate. This is an absolute. We can debate the best place to watch the sunrise on Cape Cod or the best place to see New England’s leaves turn in October, but there’s no room for argument when it comes to your first sight of Fenway…
…We went up that ramp, and the majesty of Fenway’s green unfolded before my eyes. Children today probably wouldn’t have the same reaction, but after years of seeing everything in black and white on our twenty-four-inch Zenith, it was the color of green that got my attention. Think of The Wizard of Oz when a young Judy Garland wanders out of her storm-shattered house and into the lush land of Oz. It’s the first splash of color in the classic film, and this scene often comes to mind when baby boomer Bostonians speak of their first glimpse of the venerable Boston ballyard.
It’s a near-perfect analysis, save for the faulty assumption that children in the color TV era would be underwhelmed. The green of Fenway is stunning, no matter how many times you’ve seen it – particularly at night, under sable sky with the Prudential tower marking the Boston skyline beyond right field, the Citgo sign in Kenmore Square illuminating the horizon past the left field wall, and the diamond below sparkling beneath endless banks of lights.
Echoing Updike, Shaughnessy says, “The green gets your attention. It makes the Red Sox tuxedo-white uniforms stand out. It is the backdrop that put[s] everything into focus.” Indeed, that is Fenway. Undoubtedly it is not alone among ballparks in eliciting such awe. But it is, for sure, a magical place.
To two vestiges of baseball’s bygone days, a non-partisan toast on an autumn day – a fine autumn day for a beer.
To be continued...
