Bulldozers can’t bury ghosts of Yankees’ past

But as I sat in the crowded upper deck on Saturday, melting in the scorching heat, nursing a healthy combination of overpriced water and overpriced beer and watching the Kansas City Royals engage in a slugfest with the home team, none of that mattered.

All that mattered was I finally had made it. At age 46, just a few months before the lights go permanently dark on this holy relic, I finally was cozying up to the most venerable, well-known sports shrine on the planet.

And let me tell you, The House That Ruth Built needed to apologize for nothing.

As a lifelong Orioles fan, I learned to “hate” the Yankees at an early age, when the idea of a rivalry takes deep root, even though you don’t fully understand it.

Deep down, I’ve always admired the Yankees and what they’ve stood for — sustained excellence of mythic proportions. I loved learning how Babe Ruth saved baseball as the game’s first home run hitter in the 1920s, about Lou Gehrig, Ruth’s understated and equally gifted teammate, about characters such as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra and about Mickey Mantle, the country boy who took the Big Apple by storm in the 1950s with his tape-measure blasts. And who doesn’t marvel at those elegant pinstripes?

Myth and reality all came together for me on Saturday.

You get off the subway, which rumbles hard by the stadium, and you are transported to a Yankee theme park, an island of plenty — shops, pubs, street vendors — in the midst of run-down, southwest Bronx.

You circle the ballpark on the outside, and you feel the Yankees sticking out their chests with the muscle of history behind them. The banner draped high across the stadium says it all. Twenty-six World Series championships.

Once inside, I navigate the crush of overheated humanity on the narrow concourse. I sample a fine Italian sausage, converse with natives who don’t seem to mind that I’m wearing an Orioles cap. But it’s from my seat, high above the right-field line not far past first base, that Yankee Stadium talks back the loudest.

Three times the Yankees come back, before winning, 12-11. Twice they erase four-run deficits, before Johnny Damon sends everyone home with his sixth hit of the day, the last of New York’s 19 hits.

I’m thinking the members of Murderer’s Row are raising a toast somewhere.

From my vantage point, cavernous Yankee Stadium, which originally seated 75,000, but was reduced to about 55,000 during its two-year renovation in the mid-70s, feels intimate. The outfield grass looks as plush as ever, the fences don’t seem that far away from home plate. Monument Park, which sits beyond the left-center field fence and honors the iconic Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and manager Miller Huggins — not to mention 16 players whose numbers are retired — is resplendent in the hot sun.

I keep looking around the field and imagining the ghosts coming to life. There’s Gehrig giving his “luckiest man on the face of the Earth” speech, as the disease named after him was killing him. There’s Ruth, barely audible in the grip of cancer, saying goodbye. There’s Reggie Jackson, swatting three home runs on three pitches off of three different Dodgers to clinch the 1977 World Series.

And there, rising above the famous façade and peeking in on history, is no ghost. It’s the concrete face of the new stadium, opening next April. Against the backdrop of pockmarked buildings and urban decay, the gleaming gold letters that spell “Yankee Stadium” really stand out.

Out with the old and in with the new, you say? That’s surely what the bulldozers will say, as this old jewel is laid to waste.

But that’s merely steel and dirt and concrete, just a pile of rubble.

Yankee Stadium will never die.

Gary Lambrecht writes about the NFL, Major League Baseball and college sports. He can be reached at glambrecht@baltimoreexaminer.com