Yankee Stadium, By the Numbers

Yankee Stadium, By the Numbers

Yankee Stadium, By the Numbers

Not all ballparks are created equal. This is true both literally and figuratively.

It is one of the beauties of baseball that every baseball field is unique. There are certain set dimensions, of course. It will always be 90 feet from base to base and the pitcher’s mound will always be sixty-and-six from home plate. But everything else…everything else is fluid.

And do the New York Yankees know a thing or two about fluidity when it comes to their ballpark? Yes they do. From the Polo Grounds, they moved to Yankee Stadium in 1923, promptly winning their first World Series crown that very year. They would remain at their home in the Bronx for 85 years…before moving just across the street.

But things did change.

The seating capacity in old Yankee Stadium fluctuated over the years, from 58,000 when it opened in 1923, to 82,000 by 1927, and back down to 54,028 in 1976. The new stadium holds 50,287. That’s still a lot of baseball fans.

Yankee Stadium became a part of the fabric of the city, and of the United States of America, and the years brought many a strange sight and sound. On September 22, 1966, with the Yankees on their way to a tenth-place finish in the ten-team American League, they set a Montreal Expos-like franchise record with 413 people in paid attendance at the game—and in photos of the game, it’s hard to believe there are even that many. Tickets were, perhaps, easier to come by that year than during many others.

Eight years earlier, that crowd was topped three-hundred times over by the 123,707 Jehovah’s Witnesses that packed the stadium for their international assembly on August 3, 1958. (And who were joined by a similar number across town at Shea!)”I’d give a year of my life if I can hit a home run in the first game in this new park,” Babe Ruth said of Yankee Stadium and, of course, hit one he did. In the third inning of Opening Day, 1923, Ruth went deep in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the fourth inning of the final game at old Yankee Stadium, on September 21, 2008, Jose Molina homered, writing the final page in the book that Ruth started. This would be the last home-run hit there but, fittingly, the last man to bat that day was Derek Jeter. Then, after 85 years, that book was closed and a new one was begun. The game has changed. The Yankees have changed.

The new stadium has more bathrooms, more elevators, more hot dog stands, more legroom, wider aisles, and a bigger video display. It is, without a doubt, a more comfortable place to watch a game.

Where it counts, though, the stadium is still the same. It’s still 318’ to Left Field, 408’ to Center, and 314’ to that short porch down the right field line. I’m being slightly sneaky, though, when I say things have remained the same because, to be fair, the old stadium’s dimensions changed as often as did its seating capacity.

The Yankee Stadium of Derek J0eter, Bernie Williams, and Mariano Rivera “the Sandman” looks little enough like the one prowled by the Murderer’s Row of the late 1920s. ‘Death Valley’ is long gone. The days where balls travel deep into the outfield to die, on some futile pilgrimage, have nearly slipped the mind.
Is it even possible to imagine a stadium where the distance from home plate to dead center was 490’, and the distance to left-center (left-center!) was an incredible ‘457? That the team which played in that stadium became renowned for their slugging prowess boggles the mind.

It feels perverse to discuss a place of magic and memory by placing such an emphasis on numbers but, this is baseball, and numbers have a shifting, fleeting, magic of their own. Numbers, like a ballpark, are always in motion, always changing.

And, of course, ballparks *should* change. Yankee Stadium wasn’t just a cathedral; it wasn’t just some edifice of concrete and steel. It wasn’t even a monument to those pinstriped heroes who made it their home.

It was alive. It IS alive. As its heart continues to beat—as all of our hearts beat—it is always changing.