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Baseball's new cathedral Check out photos from the Yankees' first regular season game in their new stadium.

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Moments that followed over the next eight decades will forever be a part of Yankee lore, but there wasn’t a big outpouring of sentimentality about losing the place. That’s partly because so much of its character was altered when the city renovated it in the ’70s, and partly because fans had simply tired of cramped seats, crowded hallways and overflowing bathrooms.

The new park takes care of all that. The seats are comfortable, toilets are everywhere, and the concourses are filled with so many varieties of food that the Babe would surely have a perpetual stomach ache if he were still around. The place even gets a perfect mark for handicapped seating, which wasn’t in play when the original stadium opened.

Fans who attended the opening exhibition game against the Chicago Cubs liked the fact that the field looked much like the original, there was still a short porch in right, and the monuments to past greats were still intact. They liked the nostalgic Yankees pictures that lined the halls, and the feel that while everything had changed, a lot remained the same.

What’s missing? No amusement rides past the outfield fence. No trees in the bullpens. No mascots dancing on the dugout.

More importantly, no naming rights. Yankee Stadium will always be Yankee Stadium, or so we can only hope.

It opens Thursday on what is supposed to be a sunny spring day in New York.

Fans will dig deeper into their pockets to pay for tickets, but they will come because, even if this isn’t the house the Babe built, it is a mighty fine replacement as the house the Boss built.

They will come with rich memories of the past, but with a longing to cherish moments born in the new palace. With a price tag of $1.5 billion, there better be plenty of them.

The old stadium was the cathedral of baseball, a magical place that spawned heroes and stars. The new one has a long way to go to live up to that, a task that seems impossible today even by Ruthian standards.

Still, you have to think the Babe would have approved.

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Tony Gutierrez / AP

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