No baseball team prizes its history like the New York Yankees, but that instinct took the team to an awkward place Tuesday.
The Yankees decided to use the day to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the opening of the historic Yankee Stadium, complete with a logo marking the passage of time between 1923 and 2023. They even photoshopped a before-and-after graphic of their facade.
It would be a natural milestone to celebrate — the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs did the same with Fenway Park and Wrigley Field in the previous decade — but there was just one problem.
Yankee Stadium, as we know it, is not 100 years old.
As you might remember, old Yankee Stadium was demolished in 2009, and the team moved into a new Yankee Stadium. It happened — we all saw it — and some fans were very quick to point this out Tuesday. The old Yankee Stadium is now a lovely park complex called Heritage Field.
There is nothing inherently wrong with replacing an aging stadium with a new stadium, but you can’t then pretend they’re the same stadium just because they have the same name. You can’t act like you have a 100-year-old stadium when you destroyed your old stadium 14 years ago. The current Yankee Stadium is fine in many respects, but it is not and never will be the place where Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle played.
The Yankees are trying to celebrate the anniversary of Yankee Stadium’s opening like they could’ve celebrated Yogi Berra’s 98th birthday next month, but the difference is they didn’t take Berra down with a wrecking ball and pave over him with fresh sod.
Compounding the surreality of the Yankees’ apparent decision to act like there has always been one Yankee Stadium is a feature in the team’s magazine that takes some incredible liberties with the fact that the sites of the old and new Yankee Stadiums are across the street from each other:
A century later, some 40,000 fans will come by car, by bus, by train and by foot to the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue to watch the 2023 New York Yankees take on the Los Angeles Angels. It’s a pilgrimage that has been made millions of times over, ardent fans arriving at this Bronx intersection where Gehrig’s speech and Jeter’s dive took place. Right here, two blocks from the Grand Concourse and the Bronx County Courthouse, is where Joe D’s streak began and where Mr. October was born. From Larsen’s perfecto to Judge’s debut, Yankees loyalists have witnessed history unfold.
Since the day it opened, Yankee Stadium has been much more than “some ballyard.” It has been a place where magic happens.
Again, we are talking about two different stadiums, one of which the Yankees paid billions of dollars to replace because it was so decrepit (and not lucrative enough). Aaron Judge did not make his MLB debut in the stadium where Don Larsen threw a perfect game, and to imply as much is to pretend the Yankees’ mystique can literally bend time and space.
It’s all ultimately harmless, but it’s difficult to deny there is a very Yankees flavor of weird here.
