THE eyes tell you everything. The eyes show you the way.
As it always used to be, so it is again: No matter where you are inside Yankee Stadium, upper deck or lower bowl, behind home plate or off in the wings of the mezzanine, $2,500 primo seat or 14-buck bleacher slab, eventually the eyes all fix on the same thing.
PHOTOS: OPENING DAY AT NEW STADIUM
The facade. The frieze. The emblem. The unofficial logo.
“The first time I walked into the old Stadium, that took my breath away,” an old Yankee pitcher named Bob Turley said before the first game the Yankees would play in their new home. “And there it is.”
“That,” Yogi Berra said yesterday, “brings me back.”
There wasn’t a lot else to do that trick yesterday, not on an afternoon when the Yankees would get squashed by the Cleveland Indians, 10-2. Not with CC Sabathia needing 122 pitches to labor through 5 2/3 innings. Not with the bullpen imploding behind him. Not with the Yankees’ bat rack in splinters.
Will that be OK a week from now, a month from now or, let’s be honest, today? Of course not.
But yesterday wasn’t about the emerging worries visible on the Yankee roster, because the Yankees had in their possession the kind of secret weapon that only they own.
Most sports franchises run out of answers when today becomes too bleak. Not the Yankees — because the Yankees own more yesterdays than any team in the history of professional sports.
And so they can trot out Berra to throw the first pitch in the new yard, and they can invite Bernie Williams to pick a little jazz guitar in center field, and they can bring Paul O’Neill and Boomer Wells and Tino Martinez into a new cauldron of sound.
There have been a lot of ballparks that have opened in a lot of cities over the last 20 years; but only the Yankees can put one of Babe Ruth’s old bats at home plate — the one he used to swat the first homer ever hit at the old place, across the street, 86 years ago — and then have Derek Jeter give a head fake to the bat boy, as if he wanted to take a hack with that 48-ounce beauty of a billy club.
“It’s a new Stadium, but I think they did a tremendous job in terms of bringing a lot of the characteristics of the old Stadium over here,” Jeter said.
There is a lot to be cynical about at both of the city’s new ball yards, if that’s how you want to go.
Met fans have howled all week about obstructed views. Yankee fans bit down hard as they wandered the grounds in search of marked-up gastronomic delights.
But baseball isn’t supposed to be for the cynics. It’s supposed to be for the dreamers, even on a billion-dollar field of dreams. Even in a place where advertisements hang like wallpaper on every available inch. Even when the current payroll of the current team could have built 100 versions of the original Stadium.
Maybe that’s when the eyes need most to look skyward, when they most need to lock with that wonderful new frieze, which looks so much like the wonderful old frieze.
A little taste, a slight whisper, of yesterday, on the day when the Yankees officially began to leave all their yesterdays across the street.