OPINION
By Thomas Boswell
Columnist
updated 11:56 p.m. ET July 16, 2008
 | Thomas Boswell Columnist |
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NEW YORK - The All-Star Game here Tuesday was supposed to commemorate the last season of Yankee Stadium. Instead, it was transformed into a far more topical and touching evening — a farewell to the third-of-a-century Yankee dynasty of George Steinbrenner III, the man whose wallet and will revived the most important franchise in the game.
When Steinbrenner, who seldom appears in public and never speaks when he does, rode a golf cart from the Yankees bullpen to the pitcher's mound on this evening, the symbolism pulled the whole night together. He brought with him four baseballs, one each for Yankees Hall of Famers Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Goose Gossage and Reggie Jackson, who threw out simultaneous first pitches. Only four? The ranks are thinning fast.
For months, this town has prepared an enormous baseball celebration for this day. Yet ironically, no one here seemed to understand the true focus of the night until it arrived. The Steinbrenner Era probably has run its course in the last seven seasons of incredibly expensive and disappointing postseason defeats. So the time was right, disguised as a Goodbye Ballpark affair, to pay respects to a man who spent decades being mocked across America while being grudgingly appreciated or amusingly endured here.
Signs of the time were everywhere. When Yankees Manager Joe Girardi was introduced, the mix of boos was a referendum on the 50-45 record of the man who replaced beloved Joe Torre. Every time an all-star of the first-place Red Sox — seven in all — was introduced, the stadium shook with boos, just as it roared for the mere three Yankee stars. However, the telling moment came when three Tampa Bay Rays were introduced and booed like arch enemies. Of course, the perennially pathetic Rays lead the Yanks for the wild card by 5 1/2 games. But then the Twins and A's lead the Yanks, too. Who doesn't?
The whole game, finally won 4-3 by the AL in 15 innings, had a touch of dynasty-in-distress spite at its edges. Yankees fans booed those Red Sox who failed, like Jonathan Papelbon, who gave up an eighth-inning run to give the National League a 3-2 lead, with more enthusiasm than any deed -- good or bad -- by an NL player. And when Yankees captain Derek Jeter snuffed two innings with a double-play grounder and a weak tap back to the mound, the silence was funereal.
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While an elegiac fall-of-the-Yankees mood often hung over the park, especially in this season when son Hank Steinbrenner often seemed buffoonish, the issue of the great ballpark itself also was on every mind.
They claim they're tearing down the Big Ballpark and moving everything, including Ruth and Gehrig's monuments, 100 yards away to a new American coliseum at a cost of $1.3 billion. However, that doesn't count the price of the basketball courts and green fields for Bronx kids that got plowed under to make 161st Street safe for $1,500 luxury tickets and $50 bleacher seats. That's the true Steinbrenner legacy. If you command the back pages of the tabloids for decades and dominate talk radio, you can eventually get a new park, not even in a better location, that makes the Taj Mahal blush.
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However, for some of us, this park isn't really Yankee Stadium at all. This is merely a version of the Big Ballpark, actually called "New Yankee Stadium" when it opened in '76 after a three-year near-gut renovation. That transformation, at least esthetically, didn't help the place much. So we aren't in mourning, just nostalgic.
The original Yankee Stadium was truly the House That Ruth Built and which Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle inherited. That was one long distinct era -- imperial, rich, but fairly classy. Ruth would not recognize this place. There are no more majestic white facades all around the upper-deck rim. Now they're just in part of the outfield. Nor is this the same mammoth yard that robbed DiMaggio of perhaps 100 homers with its insane 457-foot sign in left field to mark Death Valley.
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