History of Yankee Stadium Unmatched

By Bob Birge
SportsTicker Staff Writer

Tuesday night's All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium on the corner of River Avenue and 161st Street in the south Bronx will serve as a farewell tribute to a fabled ballpark in its 84th and final season. Next year, the New York Yankees move into a new facility and even though it's only two blocks away, it won't be the same.

It won't be the same hallowed ground walked on by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and all the other Yankees' legends. But the Yankees were not always the dominant team in New York. During the early part of the 20th Century, the New York Giants ruled the Big Apple, winning 10 pennants in a 20-year span. John McGraw, their fiery manager for 30 years, didn't think much of the upstart Yankees, who shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants for 10 seasons from 1913 through 1922. "The Yankees will have to build a park in Queens or some other out-of-the-way place," McGraw said in 1921, the year the Giants and Yankees played in the first of 14 Subway World Series contested in New York. "Let them go away and wither on the vine."

Things didn't exactly turn out that way. Yankee Stadium became home to the most successful sports franchise in American history. While it lost some of its old-time feel after it was remodeled in the 1970s, the old stadium inspired awe when it opened in 1923 with a seating capacity of 58,000 - unheard of at the time as most stadiums in that era had room for about 30,000 spectators. Yankee Stadium was the first baseball structure with three decks and the first televised World Series game took place there in 1947.

Its primary occupant won championship after championship. During a 44-season span from 1921 until 1964, the Yankees won 29 American League pennants. They won so much that it used to be said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel. In 1958, the author Gay Talese wrote this about the Yankees : "Wall Street bankers supposedly back the Yankees. Smith College girls approve of them. God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees' corner. The efficiently triumphant Yankee machine is a great institution, but, as they say, who can fall in love with U.S. Steel?"

Yankee Stadium, its capacity eventually increased to 67,000, has hosted 37 World Series, including 10 in the "new" stadium (post-1976). But the Yankees are only part of its legacy. Yankee Stadium hosted countless championship boxing matches, historic college football games between Notre Dame and Army, an epic National Football League title contest in 1958 involving the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants and three Papal visits. A Brazilian soccer player named Edson Arantes Do Nascimento - better known as Pele - even played there as a member of the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League in the 1970s.

It all started after the Boston Red Sox sold George Herman "Babe" Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. According to popular legend, Boston owner Harry Frazee, a Broadway producer and director, made the move to finance his play "No, No, Nanette,", although some baseball historians question if that was the real reason for the sale. That season, the third-place Yankees doubled their attendance - outdrawing the second-place Giants by 100,000. McGraw, also a part-owner of the Giants, was enraged. He didn't like that his more established team was getting upstaged and told the Yankees they would have to vacate the Polo Grounds. The co-owners of the Yankees - Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast l'Hommendieu Huston - endeavored to build their own stadium.

On February 6, 1921, the Yankees announced the purchase of 10 acres of property in the Bronx for $675,000 from the estate of William Waldorf Astor. The land was directly across the Harlem River and less than a mile from their old home. A crowd officially listed at 74,200 attended the Yankees' first game at Yankee Stadium on April 18, 1923. Fittingly, Ruth christened the new ballpark with a three-run home run as the Yankees defeated the Red Sox, 4-1. Due to Ruth's drawing power and larger than life persona in the Roaring Twenties, Yankee Stadium was soon dubbed "The House That Ruth Built". The new stadium should be called "The House That George Built" after current Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.

In their initial season at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees won the first of their 26 World Series titles, the most championships of any professional team in North America. During the early years of the dynasty, Ruppert once remarked that his idea of a good afternoon was having the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning and then slowly pull away.

In 1925, Notre Dame's Knute Rockne brought his Fighting Irish to Yankee Stadium for the first of their 20 games against Army. It remained the nation's top rivalry through World War II. Yankee Stadium was where Rockne made his "win-for-the-Gipper" speech at halftime of the 1928 game against Army. It also was the site of the 1946 Notre Dame-Army contest when the powers played to a scoreless tie in what is considered one of the legendary games in college football history.

Starting in the 1920s, Yankee Stadium also hosted 30 championship fights into the 1950s. Perhaps the most memorable was the bout between Joe Lewis and German Max Schmeling on June 22, 1938. With the Nazi party in power in Germany and Europe on the verge of war, the fight took on political and racial overtones. Schmeling beat Lewis, an African-American, two years earlier and was championed by Adolph Hitler. But in the rematch, Lewis gained revenge in stunning fashion, knocking out Schmeling in the first round.

In 1956, Yankee Stadium gained a new tenant as the NFL's New York Giants moved from the Polo Grounds and stayed through the 1973 season. In the 1958 NFL championship, the Johnny Unitas-led Colts beat the Giants, 23-17, in the league's first sudden-death overtime. Although the Super Bowl was still a decade away, that 1958 game is regarded as one of the most influence contests in NFL history and many believe it signaled the arrival of professional football as a major sport. Up until then, the pro game took a back seat to college football.

In 1965, history of a different sort was made at Yankee Stadium as Paul VI celebrate Mass before more than 80,000 as part of the first Papal visit to North America. It likely wasn't the Pope's fault, but by 1965, the Yankees' dynasty was crumbling. That season, the Yankees finished under .500 for the first time in 40 years. The next season, they finished last for the first time since 1912, when they were known as the New York Highlanders. The Babe's house became a ghost town as an unimaginably small crowd of 413 attended a late-season game in 1966.

By the late 1960s, the stadium itself also was showing signs of decay, and not helping matters was the urban blight of the south Bronx. There were even some overtures that CBS - which owned the Yankees at the time - would move the storied team across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Finally, in the middle of 1972, the city bought the team and the Yankee signed a 30-year lease.

In 1973, the team was purchased by an unknown shipbuilder from Cleveland named George M. Steinbrenner, who would get quite a bang for his buck. A franchise he bought for $10 million is now estimated to be worth close to $1 billion. More than 50 years after McGraw suggested the Yankees go play in Queens, they did just that, spending the 1974 and 1975 seasons at Shea Stadium - the home of the National League's New York Mets - while Yankee Stadium was renovated and modernized. The Yankees moved back home in 1976, winning the first of three straight pennants in the "new" stadium. They won World Series titles in 1977 and 1978, then added four more under Joe Torre from 1996-2000.

Despite drawing more than four million the year before, the Yankee announced in 2006 their plans to build a new stadium that will cost in excess of $1 billion. When the new structure opens, much of the existing stadium will be demolished and become parkland. Somewhere, the Babe is crying in his beer.

Photo: Art.com