Couldn't watch

It’s been reported that when Yankee Stadium was being built in 1922-23, the sounds of construction were clearly audible at the Polo Grounds, the National League Giants’ longtime home just across the Harlem River in upper Manhattan. It must have been a galling distraction to manager John McGraw, who detested the American League in general, and Babe Ruth in particular.

***

Our family’s first real vacation came in the summer of 1964. There are lots of things about those three weeks to Canada and back I remember, but few more vividly than New York, and none more vividly than Yankee Stadium.

We were staying at the Holiday Inn on 57th Street. When Dad came into the room and asked if we wanted to go see the Yankees that night, my brother and I did a whoop, and our mother probably did a silent sigh of relief. (Even midtown Manhattan would be relatively quiet with the two of us out of pocket for a few hours.) I did my best Whitey Ford windup, which I thought was pretty good until my smartass kid brother pointed out scornfully that Ford was a lefty.

It would be the first major league game either of us ever saw in person, and the last until the Braves came to Atlanta a couple of years later. It was a doubleheader with the White Sox, and we sat down the third base line. The Yanks swept; Ford pitched the second game; Pepitone homered. Mantle, Maris, Kubek, Richardson all played. It was the last year of that great Yankee dynasty of the ‘50s and ‘60s; Bob Gibson and the Cards would stop them cold that October, and the Yankees wouldn’t make it back to the Series again until the mid-‘70s.

When it was over, we walked past the outfield monuments to take the train back to Manhattan.

***

I should have watched Sunday night’s farewell to the Babe’s Cathedral, but I couldn’t – I just couldn’t.

In a world that keeps changing and morphing and vanishing too damn fast, one of the few things that for me all but defined permanence – something that was there long before I was born and would surely be there long after I die -- has been Yankee Stadium.

Wrong again.

I know the old ball park has deteriorated; even the renovation that saved it once is now more than 30 years in the past, and a friend who saw a Yankees game there just a couple of years ago described it perfunctorily as “a dump.”

There are no doubt a hundred perfectly logical and rational reasons why the Bronx’s most familiar and visible landmark since 1923 can’t be saved, and not one of them is good enough. All of them together wouldn’t be.

I bet even McGraw is pissed.