Old Yankee Stadium

Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built (Babe Ruth, not some muscular construction worker babe), is reaching the end of its life. Again and finally. Come next spring, the Yankees will get a new playpen. Facts and figures on that tomorrow. Today, the (mostly) original Yankee Stadium.

The park opened in 1923 and was closed in 1973 for remodeling. The 1923 building cost $2.5 million. The remodeling cost $48 million, maybe more, a lot more, with interest expense. With reconfigurations over the years, seating capacity has ranged from 54,000 to nearly 72,000. No telling if bathroom counts went up and down with seating counts.

The field dimensions have changed like crazy, fences in, fences out, fences high, fences low, it's a jumble of numbers. They're proudly saying that the new park will have the same dimensions as the old. They mean the old measurements from right now, I think.
The city of New York has owned the place since 1973.

Some of the baseball legends who performed here include the Babe (Mr. Baseball), Lou Gehrig (Mr. Endurance), Joe DiMaggio (Mr. Coffee), Yogi Berra (Mr. AFLAC), Mickey Mantle (maybe the best baseball player ever) and Roger Maris (Mr. Asterisk).

The Yankees have won 26 championships while frolic-ing in Yankee Stadium. I inserted the hyphen there because I don't like the look of the word "frolicing". Just looks weird...

There's plenty of monuments in and around Yankee Stadium, honoring Yankee greats...and 2 Cardinals. Who are the Cardinals? Stick around.

The All Star game was played in Yankee Stadium in 1939, 1960, 1977 and this year. Smallest crowd to ever watch a Yankee game was September 25, 1966, when 413 people saw the White Sox beat the Yankees 4-1.

The stadium has been the site of some historic boxing matches: Joe Louis v. Max Schmeling in 1938, Tony Zale v. Rocky Graziano in 1945, and Muhammed Ali v. Ken Norton in 1976. Many famed college football games were held here, and the NY football Giants played in Yankee Stadium from 1956 to 1973. They played pro soccer here, too, but I don't care and neither do you.

In 1950, the stadium began as the site of conventions of the Jehovah's Witnesses, with nearly 124,000 people showing up at the inaugural event. I still don't know about the bathroom count, but I don't think they guzzled a lot of beer at this event, so maybe it wasn't an issue.

Two popes celebrated mass in Yankee Stadium, and those are the Cardinals that are memorialized in Monument Park with the Yankees. Yeah, trick question.

There is a 138 foot tall baseball bat out in front; you've seen it on Seinfeld reruns.

The curtain came down Sunday, reruns are the only place to see this American monument.

Tomorrow, New Yankee $tadium.