I spent Friday at the new Yankee Stadium with dad, enjoying the jet stream that deposited moderately well-struck pop-ups into our laps behind the right-field fence. The weather cooperated and the Yankees won. The Yanks-in-a-sentence blurb would’ve been something along the lines of “the new stadium gets loud when Derek Jeter and his opposite-field lumber make it so.”
Happily, we experienced no Field-of-Dreams/baseball-as-temporal-vessel-that-connects-fathers-and-sons-across-the-generations moments. Why? One, because we get along great; and two, because that flick is a maudlin piece of poop. Instead, we ate hot dogs and drank soda. We discussed Brian Bruney’s psychotic fastball and Johnny Damon’s limp garden hose of an arm. We sent mom a photo text.
As for the stadium itself, it’s even shinier and more accommodating than I expected it to be when I made my first pilgrimage back in November. The seats are cushioned, the views are panoramic, and the concourses are bright and wide. Yes, I get the vile-temple-of-commerce thing and hate the fact that, for most games, the best seats will sit unoccupied due to their cost. But the bottom line to me is this: It’s a comfortable place to spend a few spring, summer or fall hours. Plus, you know, the Yankees play there.
There were zero undercurrents of sadness when I glanced across the street at the old building, which is being deassembled with all the alacrity of a Jorge Posada trundle down the first-base line. There were memories there. There will be memories here. Life goes on. It’s resilient that way.
Freedy Johnston wrote a fine, conflicted song about parting with a piece of the past, Tearing Down This Place, which I’m assuming is at least somewhat grounded in his own experience. As he wrote in the first line of one of the songs that proceeds it on Can You Fly: “Well, I sold the dirt to feed the band…” It’d follow that the house on that dirt got sold/vaporized as well.
Anyway, Tearing Down This Place is today’s FReedy MonFRday selection. Buy it here.
