[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast Thursday, I trekked down to the Bronx to watch David Ortiz, my favorite major league player, in his final game against the New York Yankees. But through the touching pregame ceremony, and the feeling of watching him on the field for the last time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, as much as I would miss Big Papi, it wouldn’t be half as much as I missed the feeling of going to games at the old Yankee Stadium.
Don’t get me wrong. The new stadium, which opened its doors in 2009, is beautiful. State-of-the-art facilities, huge video scoreboards, a number of higher-end dining options; it’s everything a fan should want in a venue.
But it’s just not the same.
Even for a Boston fan, heading into the House that Ruth Built was always exhilarating. The cramped, winding corridors, the smell of stale beer that hung around the place, that moment when you could first laid your eyes on the roof’s famous façade as you made your way out from the bowels of the stadium?
There was a certain charm to the old place.
And a big part of that charm—for lack of a better word—came from the sort of Yankee fans who used to populate the place.
It used to be a badge of honor to wear my Red Sox finery to 153rd Street. I knew that once I set foot inside the cathedral of baseball, I’d have a whole lot of things flying at me—mostly taunts, but also the occasional half-eaten pretzel—as I headed into enemy territory to take my seat. I can still remember the way the entire stadium shook during the 2004 ACLS when Pedro Martinez took the mound in Game 2, and the Yankee faithful showered him with a chorus of “Who’s your daddy?” chants.
Thursday night’s scene, however, was a far cry from that.
Of course, a lot of that has to do with the Yankees’ disappointing play this year. After an August surge, the Yanks struggled down the stretch and came into the game with the Red Sox barely clinging to their playoff hopes; they would be mathematically eliminated before the game was over.
The result was that I missed out on what could have been a tremendous experience, watching a stadium full of Yankee fans raining boos on the Red Sox slugger until potentially offering him a begrudging round of applause on his exit.
As it stood, the stadium was about half empty, with at least half of the fans fans in attendance decked out in Sox gear. A few old-school holdouts tried to whip the Bombers fans into an anti-Red Sox frenzy, but they just didn’t have it in them to muster up the same level of enmity for the Red Sox that was commonplace just 10 short years ago.
But even if the building and the atmosphere will never be the quite same, there is some hope that one day, we might see something approximating the good old days of this rivalry.
On my way out of the stadium after the game, an older Yankee fan—no doubt inspired by more than a few of the stadium’s $12 beers—told me, in no uncertain terms, that the Red Sox stunk. Honestly, it warmed my heart.
I walked up to him with a smile on my face, wished his team the best of luck in the playoffs, and headed on out the door.
Maybe there’s still a lit of the old Bronx still alive; we just need to make Yankee Stadium great again.
