The Grad School Diaries: The House Ruth Didn’t Build

We hop off the train and make our way across the platform, down the metal stairs, and around the corner, and there it is: the grand white building that other authors have called a “cathedral of baseball history.” It looks somewhat more modern and rather less permanent that the original Yankee Stadium across the street, despite being built with a larger (proportional) budget, using modern materials and a generally superior design. The new ballpark is just as beautiful, but it lacks the decades of history (good and bad) and hundreds of quirks (also both good and bad) that made the original version a landmark of the sport. For the moment this is just another new state-of-the-art baseball venue. But wait a minute; I’m a Dodgers Fan! Born and raised in Southern California, I bleed blue and my heart belongs in Chavez Ravine! What the heck am I doing in the Bronx?

It began almost 18 months ago, with a present I got my father for his 70th birthday. One of my earliest memories (certainly the earliest involving professional sports) is walking into Dodger Stadium with my father in 1970 or so; if I’ve got the year right I was five years old at the time, and about to start the first grade. It was an afternoon game, the weather was perfect, and we were close enough to the field that I could smell the newly-cut grass; I recall being awed by both the size and the beauty of the place. Even today, in my mind at least, that’s what summer is supposed to smell like, and that’s what a baseball venue is supposed to look like, and I don’t suppose that will ever change. And while I’m sure that period in our lives wasn’t as happy as I’d like to imagine it, the memories that have stayed with me from that time still involve baseball games and trying to learn how to hit and throw a ball in our backyard…

For father’s 70th birthday, my wife and I found a picture of me from that era, holding my first real baseball bat in our back yard with a look of fierce determination. Clearly, the five-year-old me is GOING to hit that ball, if it’s the last thing I ever do; a behavior pattern that I retain to this day, even if I still can’t hit a baseball. We gave him a framed copy of the picture, and a card in which I invited him to go back with me to Dodger Stadium and see another game – any game before we left LA, as it turned out. But when the big day arrived my father had the flu, and was could barely stand up, let alone go to a ballgame. My wife and I wound up using those tickets, and I promised to take my father to a game the next time we were both in a city with a major league team during baseball season to replace them, but this has proven difficult to accomplish with us living in East Lansing Michigan (a fair distance away from anywhere) and my father and stepmother dividing time between Los Angeles and New York…

Eventually we settled on a Yankees game in New York, since it’s closer to East Lansing and my folks were going to be there for more of the 2009 season, which led to the passage through three airports in four hours referenced in our last Grad School Diaries post, and then through this morning’s passage through the New York subway system. It still seems strange to me; a visit to the ballpark in my home town involves a two-hour car trip/parking expedition/hike, not a five-minute walk and a twenty-eight minute train ride. For that matter, it’s alien to me to be in a ballpark in the middle of town, when everybody knows they’re supposed to be in a suburb nearby; or for that matter, a ballpark where the Yankees are the beloved home team, and not the historical arch-enemy. But ultimately, none of that matters. For this afternoon, at least, we’ve gone back to the ballpark to watch another game together, and it will do fine…