The concourses were really small, and the bathrooms still had those troughs where everyone had to line up in the men's room. I knew immediately why they were building a new one, and at the same time I couldn't figure out why they would build a new one. It was the first time I had seen the place, this building that held more baseball history than any other, and it only had one more month left for the Bleacher Creatures to do the roll call during the top of the 1st inning. Yankee Stadium only had 13 more regular season games left, and it was the first time I had seen it.
My dad, my twin brother, and myself were finally making the trek up to New York City from North Carolina to see Yankee Stadium before they tore it down. My dad had been there years before, but it was a totally new experience for me and my brother. We went up on a Saturday morning to catch two day games against the Blue Jays, with Roy Halladay going in the second game. As soon as we deplaned at LaGuardia, all we could talk about was the history we knew about the stadium: Mantle almost hitting a ball out of the whole thing, Ruth and Gehrig as part of the Murderer's Row teams, and Munson and Bench battling it out for catcher supremacy. The cab ride to the stadium was almost a blur, all I could think about was going to a place I had only seen in pictures and on TV. We walked up to the stadium, and I could barely contain my excitement. We walked in the front doors underneath the iconic Yankee Stadium sign, and towards our seats behind first base on the middle deck. We looked out and saw Monument Park, the impossibly short porches in the corners and the way the wall just kept going and going in left center field. The thing that I remember most about sitting in my seat two hours before first pitch isn't the conversation. It was soaking in so many baseball memories with my dad who taught me how to play the game, and my brother who I had always played it with. Everywhere I looked something new, something I had only read about caught my eye. As cliche as it sounds, it was almost like going to a really old cathedral and seeing all of the history in the place.
The first game featured two nobodies as starting pitchers, John Parrish for the Jays and Darrell Rasner for the Yankees. And yea, I just had to look up who started the game. That first game I was so overwhelmed with just being in the building, all I can remember is what happened in the eighth inning. The Blue Jays brought in a reliever who I had never heard of, some guy named League, and I was talking with my brother when I heard my dad tell us to watch this guy warm up. I caught the next throw, and it was absolute gas. We all wondered how hard he threw, and were taking guesses when Mr. Steroids himself, A-Rod stepped up. The first pitch was a blur, and got clocked at 99 miles per hour. A-Rod couldn't handle the heat, and went down swinging, along with Jason Giambi and Xavier Nady. To this day, the only thing I remember baseball wise about my first game at Yankee Stadium was some guy named Brandon League throwing 100 mile per hour heat past 2 would be hall of famers, and a scrub named Xavier Nady.
League ended up being the winning pitcher.
Everything else I remember about that day is the sheer joy I felt in experiencing one of baseball's treasures with the two people I had learned to love baseball with.
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