Farewell to our field of dreams

In the stands in the Bronx on Sunday night, one man held a sign that read, “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee fan.” It was a sentiment that was probably in the heart of every person who has ever worn a navy blue baseball hat with the interlocking “NY.” As I watched the final outs of the last ever game at Yankee Stadium (barring a miraculous intervention by the baseball gods and Bill Buckner’s return to active status), the realization that my future tickets will be for a seat north of 161st Street began to sink in.

Sure: If you build it, they will come. The Steinbrenner family knows that. They also know that 6,000 fewer seats, higher ticket prices, more retail space, a glass-walled restaurant in centerfield and record-setting attendance will mean unprecedented revenue. They can add all the old-style touches they want — revive the mechanical scoreboard and bring back the frieze and facade of the pre-renovation days — but the new Yankee Stadium will be a modern ballpark, a creature of the free agency and big market sports era, a symbol of baseball’s leap into the 21st century.

I never knew the original cathedral, Babe Ruth’s stadium. If the Bambino’s ghost had been in attendance at the very last game before the ballpark closed its doors on Sunday, he wouldn’t have recognized the house that he built. My Yankee Stadium still has the short porch in rightfield but has lost the frieze and Death Valley and put Monument Park behind the fence and out of play. My stadium has no copper frieze, no noticeable structural columns, far fewer bleacher seats and a wall to prevent people waiting on the subway platform from watching the game.

Even so, the renovated Yankee Stadium was still the same building. I could sit in the bleachers and practically see the Babe, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Yogi, Mickey, Reggie and all the other pinstriped heroes of years past stepping into that batter’s box only 314 feet from Section 37. Postseason heroics reside in every corner of the stadium where regular men became October legends. Aaron Boone would have been a thoroughly unmemorable, average ballplayer who bounced from team to team were it not for his walk-off home run in the 11th inning of the 2003 American League Championship Series to send the Yankees to the World Series and the Red Sox home to sulk for one more winter.

In a segment during ESPN’s coverage of the final game, Yogi Berra declared, “I won’t miss this place because it’s inside ’a me. Baseball’s my life and this is where I lived it. … I’m not going to dream about perfect games and championships, I’m gonna remember them.” Baseball’s my passion, and Yankee Stadium was where I grew up with it. There have been two of those pitching gems and four world titles in my lifetime, and I’ll remember those forever, but I only saw those on TV. My true memories are of walking through the concrete tunnel from the concourse, toward the white lights blazing in the night sky, and emerging into the vast openness of blue seats, green grass, thousands of excited New Yorkers and the interlocking “NY” behind home plate. I’ll remember the summer day when my family had nothing to do, and we drove into the city and scalped upper-deck tickets to see the Yanks take on the Royals, and my dad dove for a foul ball. I’ll remember the first time I sat with Bald Vinny and the rest of the bleacher creatures and participated in the roll call at the start of the games, helped kill the wave and chanted insults at the rightfield box seats. The creatures will have a home next year, and so will the people in the box seats. So, though some things will be different next year, some things won’t. As a good friend of mine reassured me Sunday night, “We, the fans, will not change, and we will be as rowdy as ever, as hostile as ever and as crazy as ever.”

If you build it, they will come. The fans will be there next season, and if the ghosts could find their way to Kevin Costner’s Iowa cornfield, I’m sure they can find their way across 161st Street, too. And with some luck, they’ll bring along all the memories from my field of dreams and fill the new ballpark with the same magic.