BOSTON — It’s too small. Half the seats face away from the action they’re supposed to face toward. Almost every seat is ridiculously micro-sized, as if they were designed for a smaller form of human being — which makes sense, because it was built in 1912, when on average most human beings were smaller than they are now.
Everything about Fenway Park should scream: Dump!
And yet being here for a couple of days only conjures a different kind of emotion, a different feeling.
This is what we had.
This is what we miss.
Look, it probably comes off like the worst kind of spoiled-brat lament, because the two new baseball stadiums that will be celebrating their 10th anniversary next year are, in a word, beautiful.
That isn’t to say that they’re perfect. They are not. Citi Field still lacks much identity with Mets’ history. It still seems weird that the usher are wearing Phillies colors.
Yankee Stadium comes across, fairly or no, as a rich-man’s playpen, and the dimensions make a lot of what occurs there hard to take seriously sometimes (after all, it isn’t just the Yankees who hit cheap home runs there).
Still, they really are striking, both of them. There isn’t a bad seat in the house at Citi (and even those that have some obstruction, there are easily accessible video boards to fill in the blanks. Yankee Stadium has every bell and whistle you could ask for. And it is so clean you could eat your fried Oreos off the floor.
They’re just … well, too new.
And replaced ballparks that contained so much … stuff. Walking around old Yankee Stadium — even the refurbished version, which stood from 1976-2008 — meant walking in the same footsteps, on the same footprint, as most of the bold-faced baseball names of the 20th Century. Years ago, I was able to take my father to the Stadium early, before a game, and there was only one thing he wanted to do.
“This is where the Clipper worked,” he said, awe in his voice, as we stood in the great lawn of center field. It was the same voice he might have used in the Sistine Chapel as he observed the old working space of another Italian artist named Michelangelo. I didn’t think he’d ever leave there. He smiled for two weeks after.
Shea Stadium? Look, it was younger, it aged more rapidly, it had no institutional memory prior to 1964. But it was still the place where the Beatles played, twice, reinventing the limits of where rock-and-roll could be played. It was where the young Joe Namath’s spirals seemed oblivious to swirling wind. For a younger generation, it was where the Police had what to a man they call their greatest concert (on a bill alongside R.E.M. and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, August 1983). And, of course, it was where the Mets became the Mets, for all the remarkable highs and unseemly lows that represents.
That was why that autumn 10 years ago was so melancholy, more than 8 million folks visiting the two doomed stadiums in 2008. So many of them had been praying to be delivered from these old city dumps to new palaces, so it was only as they took their lasy tours around the places that they realized: Damn, we’re going to miss this.
And when you visit a place like Fenway Park, those old feelings are hard to shake. The Wall, which has been there since the beginning of time, and the patch of grass in front, patrolled for years by Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski. Center field? Tris Speaker roamed there. The pitcher’s mound? Yes, on that same patch of dirt an old hurler named Babe Ruth threw the last innings of his legendary pitching career before changing jobs and becoming the greatest hitter who ever lived.
Right there. Right here. You can see them still. This is the part we miss the most.
Vac’s Whacks
I followed every move Dave Anderson ever made, both up close and from a distance, because the longtime Times columnist wasn’t just the best of the best in the field of sports writing, he was a gentleman, generous with his time and encouragement, forever serving as a role model for generations of scribes like me who wanted to emulate him as best we could since we knew we could never be as good as him. Godspeed to a great man.
I try to be open-minded about things like this, and I like a good cocktail every bit party as much as the next guy. But would it be a crime to limit champagne celebrations in baseball to LCS and World Series clinchers?
I miss competing with Gary Myers during football seasons, but now that we are no longer professional adversaries, it’s possible for me to tell you that I cannot possibly recommend more highly his new book, “How ’Bout Them Cowboys,” which is on sale starting Tuesday. Some first-rate storytelling there.
It would be a remarkably good thing for Phil Mickelson to keep his mouth shut for a while. He follows up a clown-shoes verbal performance at the U.S. Open by griping about the Ryder Cup course where he spent the weekend merrily chopping out of the woods (when, by rights, he should’ve been hustling Nassaus that weekend at his home course).
Whack Back at Vac
Thomas Winkler: Congratulations to European Ryder Cup captain Thomas Bjorn for winning back the Cup, but he should ask for a mulligan for not creating the best foursome team in history when he did not pair Rory McIlroy with Tommy Fleetwood. How could you stop the team of Fleetwood McIIroy?
Vac: Especially since most of the Americans playing that weekend were forced to mutter “Go your own way” at their golf balls as they hooked and sliced off the tee.
Scott Wolinetz: With all due respect to the myriad baseball stat-heads, the real inventor of the baseball shift was Coach Morris Buttermaker of the Bears, when he announced the Cool Carl Paranski shift against the Mets back in 1976.
Vac: As my guy @Super70sSports says: If you’re asking me, one guy to win one baseball game, I’m going with Buttermaker every time.
@Monty1Capuletti: I think we should all strive to be written about, at our passing, in the same way that I have read about Dave Anderson in the last few days.
@MikeVacc: If the rest of us lived our life the way Dave did, the world would be a 75 percent better place to live. Minimum.
Alex Burton: Sam Darnold has had the accountability to publicly admit, “I have to do a better job,” more times in four games than Eli Manning has in the last five years. And I’m a Giants fan.
Vac: He’s not wrong, you know.
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