I CAN’T believe this is happening, but I’ll admit it: I’m getting sentimental about our old ballparks. I miss them already. Maybe this is less surprising about Yankee Stadium, which is still the greatest baseball place on earth, even in its 84th year rising out of 161st Street and River Road. But the fact is, I grow just as dusty each time I pull past what used to be the outfield parking lots at Shea, too.
Cranes and trucks and crude concrete blocks are a part of our baseball skyline this summer, and it’s good, and it’s necessary. Sometimes you can get caught up in the romanticism of Yankee Stadium and forget the chunks of it that randomly succumbed to gravity more than nine years ago. There is little romantic about Shea; all you have to do is look around.
Still, even though the teams are only going to be moving a few strides away from where they currently reside, even though the new ballpark basilicas in The Bronx and in Queens are going to be welcome additions to both the city’s architectural family and to its status as the greatest sporting city in the world, it’s hard not to hear the voice of The Chairman every time one of the doomed parks comes into view:
And there used to be a ballpark
Where the field was warm and green
And the people played their crazy game
With a joy I’d never seen.
And the air was such a wonder
From the hot dogs and the beer
Yes, there used a ballpark, right here.
So kill me. I’m just an old sentimental softy.
One of these days, believe it or not, Citi Field will face the wrecker’s ball. One of these days, there will be a third Yankee Stadium needed, the way there’s a need for a fifth version of Madison Square Garden. When that day comes, 50 or 60 years from now, it’s possible the idea of one combined uber-park won’t be quite as impossible to conceive as it was when the latest ballparks were hatched.
And maybe then, in that ballpark of the future that our grandchildren will flock to, we can find a place to truly capture all the flavor and all the fabulous quirks and hidden qualities of all the yards we’ve called home through time. Maybe. And maybe they can stick this column in a time capsule until then, and take to heart a few suggestions for the House That I’d Build (if I had a spare billion bucks and a baseball team to play in it):
You have to have The Bat.
And you have to have The Facade, the old kind, the kind they swear they’re faithfully replicating in the new Yankee Stadium, the kind that rings three-quarters of the park and not just the bleachers, and let’s hope they really mean that.
You have to have the Home Run Top Hat, which is cheesy and clichéd but, then, so is proposing to your girlfriend on top of the Empire State Building. Only in New York can cheesy and clichéd also be classy.
You have to have a memorable scoreboard, and so for this I nominate the one that used to dominate Ebbets Field, the one at the bottom of which was Abe Stark’s famous ad (“HIT SIGN, WIN SUIT!”), the one that seemed to stretch from Flatbush all the way to Park Slope and back. The best New York scoreboard ever built.
You have to fun with the outfield dimensions, and so why not do something crazy, like replicate right field and center field at the old Polo Grounds? People talk about the short porch at Yankee Stadium, but it was at the Polo Grounds his first few years as a Yankee that Babe Ruth perfected his long-ball stroke. Bring that back. And don’t be afraid to make center field an epic poke, the way it used to be at the Polo Grounds. Only four people ever reached the center-field bleachers in its most recognizable incarnation (Luke Easter, Joe Adcock, Hank Aaron, Lou Brock), because the distance to center field was 433 feet at its closest, 505 feet at its most distant, and 483 when the Mets played the last game there on Sept. 18, 1963. Maybe by then, chicks will dig small ball.
You have to have tomato plants, in honor of Joe Pignatano.
You have to have Monument Park.
You have to have retired numbers, of course, and by 2067 the Mets may even have decided to retire a few.
You have to have that skyline tableau that’s rested atop the Shea Scoreboard the past few years, the one that has a red, white and blue ribbon covering the place where the Twin Towers ought to be.
Mostly, you have to build the kind of ballpark that, 60 years after that, when they start to play in the next New York ballpark (and Roger Clemens enters the option year of his final contract), still moves you the way you should be moved when you hear these lyrics:
And the people watched in wonder
How they’d laugh and how they’d cheer
And there used to be a ballpark, right here.
Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His new book, “1941: The Greatest Year in Sports,” will be released June 5 and is available for pre-order at Amazon.com.