You may have heard that old Yankee Stadium is no more, to be replaced next year by new Yankee Stadium. 2008 being the last year of old Yankee Stadium, a bevy of books was published commemorating the House that Ruth Built.
One of the best is Harvey Frommer's tome, Remembering Yankee Stadium (published by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang). In a nutshell, this book is beautifully illustrated with vintage photographs and contains hundreds of stories and remembrances from dozens of baseball personalities.
If you're searching for a book for that Yankee fan in your life, you really can't go wrong with this book.
I received a review copy of this over the summer, and I've been waiting to read it until the season ended and I had more time. I've been perusing it over the past few days and it really is a fun stroll down Yankee Stadium lane. It's organized by decade, beginning with the opening of the stadium in the 1920s all the way through this year.
The standard text, written by Frommer, covers all the significant historic moments in a no-frills, just-the-facts style, which uncovers lots of fun little details but doesn't break much new ground. In fact, I would have liked to read more in-depth information about some of the decisions and developments. For example, Frommer points out that the stadium was designed to favor left-handed hitters, but he doesn't explain why. Was it just for Babe Ruth? Was it to take advantage of the physical location and the setting sun...? Over the years, I've read conflicting statements about it, and I was hoping Frommer would settle the matter, but no.
Anyway, you're not really buying the book for the basic history anyway. You're buying it for the personal memories of players, fans, reporters, and stadium employees that make up a huge part of this book. It's amazing that Frommer was able to assemble such a wonderful collection of personalities, and they're going to carry you through the book. Whitey Ford, Sparky Lyle, Reggie Jackson, they're all here.
Really, you can't go wrong with this book as a holiday gift.
Where to buy:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Showing posts with label yankee stadium. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yankee stadium. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Goodbye Yankee Stadium
As you may have heard (assuming you read ESPN, SI, TSN, or just about any other sports-related magazine, website, or blog), old Yankee Stadium hosted its last game yesterday. The Yanks beat the Orioles 7-3 in an apparently emotional farewell. Everybody's doing their tributes to Yankee Stadium, and if I don't, I'll be kicked out of the baseball bloggers union. So here goes.
Some random (negative) thoughts about Yankee Stadium:
- The fact that there will be no post-season baseball this year in The Bronx is further proof that there are no "baseball gods." If there were, and if They were Yankee fans (why wouldn't They be, after all those championships?), then the last game at Yankee Stadium this year would have featured Mariano Rivera shutting down some hapless NL opponent in game four or game seven of the World Series. But alas, the Tampa Bay Rays ruined everything by actually being good this season. Sorry, Steinbrenner family.
- In fact, the last World Series game in Yankee Stadium history came in game six of the 2003 series, when Josh Beckett shut out the Yanks on five hits to clinch Florida's unexpected championship.
- The last playoff game in Yankee Stadium was an equally ignominious loss for New York in 2007 against the Cleveland Indians in the Division Series.
- The last important game against the archrival Red Sox in Yankee Stadium was game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, when New York completed the greatest collapse in American sports history by losing 10-3. (Of course, you remember that the New Yorkers became the first club to lose a series after leading 3 games to 0.)
Yes, yes, I'm focusing on the bad stuff. Sorry about that. My anti-Yankee sentiment is rising to the surface. For about the first 80 years of its history, pretty much only good stuff (for the Yankees) happened at the Stadium. All those championships, all the times they demolished Boston or the Dodgers or any other club that tried to knock the club off its throne. All the great players who patrolled its environs: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson, and so on.
It's sad to see such a vital piece of baseball history tossed aside. On the other hand, the place was old, and the march of progress requires replacing old with new.
Goodbye, old Yankee Stadium.
Hello, new Yankee Stadium.
Some random (negative) thoughts about Yankee Stadium:
- The fact that there will be no post-season baseball this year in The Bronx is further proof that there are no "baseball gods." If there were, and if They were Yankee fans (why wouldn't They be, after all those championships?), then the last game at Yankee Stadium this year would have featured Mariano Rivera shutting down some hapless NL opponent in game four or game seven of the World Series. But alas, the Tampa Bay Rays ruined everything by actually being good this season. Sorry, Steinbrenner family.
- In fact, the last World Series game in Yankee Stadium history came in game six of the 2003 series, when Josh Beckett shut out the Yanks on five hits to clinch Florida's unexpected championship.
- The last playoff game in Yankee Stadium was an equally ignominious loss for New York in 2007 against the Cleveland Indians in the Division Series.
- The last important game against the archrival Red Sox in Yankee Stadium was game 7 of the 2004 ALCS, when New York completed the greatest collapse in American sports history by losing 10-3. (Of course, you remember that the New Yorkers became the first club to lose a series after leading 3 games to 0.)
Yes, yes, I'm focusing on the bad stuff. Sorry about that. My anti-Yankee sentiment is rising to the surface. For about the first 80 years of its history, pretty much only good stuff (for the Yankees) happened at the Stadium. All those championships, all the times they demolished Boston or the Dodgers or any other club that tried to knock the club off its throne. All the great players who patrolled its environs: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jackson, and so on.
It's sad to see such a vital piece of baseball history tossed aside. On the other hand, the place was old, and the march of progress requires replacing old with new.
Goodbye, old Yankee Stadium.
Hello, new Yankee Stadium.
Friday, April 18, 2008
This Day in Baseball... Yankee Stadium
Today marks the 85th anniversary of the opening of Yankee Stadium. In the opening game, none other than Babe Ruth hit a 2-run home run off the Red Sox's Howard Ehmke in a 4-1 Yankee victory. Here's a little background on the stadium, which will close after this year.
Today we take for granted the big concrete and steel, 60,000-seat sports facilities. We call them stadiums, of course. But in the 1920s, they didn’t exist. There were 30,000-seat ballparks, yes, but no gigantic stadiums as we know them today. Think of the old-time ballparks: Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, the Polo Grounds, and so on... not a stadium among them (back then, Tiger Stadium was known as Navin Field).
Yankee Stadium—the “House that Ruth Built”—changed all that. It was fitting that the nation’s largest city should serve as home for the most innovative entertainment facility of its time, and even more fitting that the country’s most larger-than-life sports figure should have something to do with it. For it was Ruth who put the Yankees on the baseball map by making them a good enough team to draw more fans than the rival Giants, to whom the Yankees had always played second fiddle. As a reward, the Yankees designed the Stadium for him, building a right field fence just 294 feet down the line so his clouts wouldn’t have to travel too far to go out of the park. Meanwhile, left-center and center field were cavernous—490 to dead center, 395 to left center—dimensions that cost the right-handed-hitting Joe DiMaggio countless home runs.
Yankee Stadium seated more than 70,000 fans when it opened, around twice as much as any other existing ballpark, and enabled the team to become the first club to draw more than two million fans. Like all great ballparks, the Stadium had some pretty amazing quirks. From the 1930s until the extensive remodeling in 1974–75, three marble monuments honoring Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and legendary manager Miller Huggins stood in deep center field—in play. Once, while watching a long fly bounce around out of reach of his fielders, an exasperated Casey Stengel is purported to have shouted, “Ruth, Gehrig, Huggins, someone throw that ball in here NOW!” During the $100 million renovation, builders placed an inner fence in front of the monuments, shortening the outfield distance but also removing one of baseball’s coolest quirks.
The new Yankee Stadium is set to open next year.
Today we take for granted the big concrete and steel, 60,000-seat sports facilities. We call them stadiums, of course. But in the 1920s, they didn’t exist. There were 30,000-seat ballparks, yes, but no gigantic stadiums as we know them today. Think of the old-time ballparks: Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, the Polo Grounds, and so on... not a stadium among them (back then, Tiger Stadium was known as Navin Field).
Yankee Stadium—the “House that Ruth Built”—changed all that. It was fitting that the nation’s largest city should serve as home for the most innovative entertainment facility of its time, and even more fitting that the country’s most larger-than-life sports figure should have something to do with it. For it was Ruth who put the Yankees on the baseball map by making them a good enough team to draw more fans than the rival Giants, to whom the Yankees had always played second fiddle. As a reward, the Yankees designed the Stadium for him, building a right field fence just 294 feet down the line so his clouts wouldn’t have to travel too far to go out of the park. Meanwhile, left-center and center field were cavernous—490 to dead center, 395 to left center—dimensions that cost the right-handed-hitting Joe DiMaggio countless home runs.
Yankee Stadium seated more than 70,000 fans when it opened, around twice as much as any other existing ballpark, and enabled the team to become the first club to draw more than two million fans. Like all great ballparks, the Stadium had some pretty amazing quirks. From the 1930s until the extensive remodeling in 1974–75, three marble monuments honoring Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and legendary manager Miller Huggins stood in deep center field—in play. Once, while watching a long fly bounce around out of reach of his fielders, an exasperated Casey Stengel is purported to have shouted, “Ruth, Gehrig, Huggins, someone throw that ball in here NOW!” During the $100 million renovation, builders placed an inner fence in front of the monuments, shortening the outfield distance but also removing one of baseball’s coolest quirks.
The new Yankee Stadium is set to open next year.
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