A Monument Closes But It Ain't Over for Wally
By RICHARD STEIER
If the team's recent tradition had held, Yankee Stadium would be hosting its last baseball game this weekend, as the team prepared to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs for the fourth consecutive year.

Maybe the impatience of the Steinbrenners to move into the new ballpark across the street accelerated the process, leaving the Bronx Bombers, for the first time in 15 years, outside looking in as baseball's post-season began.

Believers in the supernatural suspect that four summers ago, when it was first reported that the Yankees and the Bloomberg administration were discussing a plan to build a new stadium at the site of Macombs Dam Park, the "Curse of the Bambino" passed from the Red Sox to the Yankees. Is it simply a coincidence, they ask, that in October 2004 the Yankees — who had never lost a playoff series to Boston — became the first baseball team to blow a three games to none series lead, opening the door for the Red Sox to win the World Series and end an 86-year stretch without a championship? Or did Babe Ruth's ghost turn its back on the team that was about to abandon the House That He Built, leaving Yankee Tradition on life support in favor of greater luxury box revenues?

THERE USED TO BE A BALLPARK: Yankee Stadium, sometimes called the Cathedral of Baseball, is slated for the wrecking ball as a new, more luxury box-friendly replacement opens next year just up the street.

It's Either That or A-Rod

How else to explain the team's coming up short ever since, even as each year brought added spending on ballplayers? Unless, of course, you subscribed to the theory that the negative aura surrounding A-Rod was even more powerful than the Wrath of Ruth.

These were the existential questions Wally the Ex-Firefighter was confronting as we sat in traffic on the exit ramp of the Major Deegan Expressway Sept. 21, nearly three hours before the Yankees' final game at the place that will always be The Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles. When his SUV finally inched down to the bottom of the ramp, the cop guarding the entrance to the players parking lot against intrusions by those who didn't count spied my father in the shotgun seat and said, "You're not on the list, but you're here every day," and waved us on. It seemed for a moment that some fundamental verities still applied, but then the guy overseeing the lot gestured toward aisles clogged with an overflow of cars and told us the only three remaining pieces of real estate would go to "Friends of Steinbrenner."

For a few minutes, Wally tried to reason with him, first with a $10 bill protruding from his fist, then with a twenty. The guy shrugged his shoulders, his way of saying that in this instance, money couldn't buy happiness. Wally decided to sit for another five minutes, hoping the law of inertia might keep us anchored to this spot outside the lot, even when I pointed out that we were blocking a police scooter that would undoubtedly be deployed sometime between then and the end of the game. Finally, reluctantly accepting defeat, Wally maneuvered the RAV 4 away from the area as we set off in search of parking, hopefully of the legal kind, someplace else.

We were ready to give a guy up the block $50 for the last spot in his lot, but he held out for $80, and we drove off. A lot on East 151st St. and Walton Ave. was full, but Wally, with the resourcefulness born of a career spent disregarding the parking regulations that applied to ordinary citizens, pulled the SUV onto the sidewalk, where one space lay open. He said he was ready to live with the parking ticket as long as the car didn't get towed. I pointed out that the tree directly in front of the SUV would make towing it more difficult, unless the driver didn't care how much damage the RAV 4 sustained if it hit the tree a few times while being guided into the street. After getting no assurances from the female lot attendant that the car would still be on the sidewalk after the game, Wally ruminated on the issue for a bit, then decided that discretion was the better part of unmitigated gall, and we wound up parking legally on the Grand Concourse by 144th St., about nine Aaron Heilman home-run balls away from the Stadium.

Going Got Tough, He Got Outta Town

Wally was not in the sort of manic funk that overtakes him when the Yankees are, say, a game behind in a playoff series; despair had already given way to resignation, knowing that even if the Yankees won that night, it would just postpone their inevitable elimination (by two days, as it turned out) from the playoff race. He wasn't even going to second-guess his own potential culpability: for three weeks in August, as the team began to slip further behind the Rays and Red Sox, Wally had been touring The Continent, leading his family on a tour of Ireland, Spain and France.

France! What rankled most of all was that not only was he not sheepish about ditching Posada and Pavano for Paris, he came home raving about the City of Light and its charms, even though at one point he had been forced to foil a mugging by preemptively slamming into one of his would-be assailants while strolling with his two oldest kids.

Normally his absence from Yankeeland during such a crucial period could have been held against him by our neighbors in the upper deck just to the first-base side of home plate, but they were nowhere to be seen when we got to our seats. Jimmy Behind Us had apparently opted to capitalize on the high demand for tickets for the final game and sold his. So had Alex the Oversized Correction Officer, although since night games tended to leave him sufficiently inebriated that he wound up stepping on our toes or spilling beer on them, we didn't spend much time lamenting his absence.

They Forgot the Hedges

The pre-game ceremonies included Yankee employees dressed up as the members of the 1923 team which opened the Stadium jogging out to center field, although the team forgot to provide hedges for them to exit through to complete the "Field of Dreams" motif.

The introductions of living players whose glory days were as far back as 50 years ago gave the pre-game ceremonies an Old Timers Day feel, but the fact that The Stadium was about to pass into the next world induced an added bit of nostalgia even for those who try to resist drinking too deeply from that cup.

The opponent that night being the Baltimore Orioles added some resonance for me, since my first conscious trip to a baseball game (my father took me to a Brooklyn Dodger game when I was 3 and he couldn't get a baby-sitter, but I have no independent memory of that) had been at age 6 to see them play the Yankees on Aug. 15, 1960. Ron Hansen and Jackie Brandt homered for the Orioles that night, but Mickey Mantle hit two homers — the second one off Hoyt Wilhelm after the Oriole catcher offered a reprieve by dropping his foul pop-up — and gave the Yankees a 4-3 win. My most tangible memories of that game — I recalled the Brandt homer but had to go on-line to correct my memory that The Mick had hit just one homer and Yogi Berra had hit another — were of being driven to my father's office in the old New York Post building on West St. and then being dazzled by the greenness of the Stadium grass, which didn't exactly come through on our black-and-white TV, and the brilliance of the ballpark's lights.

Mom Commands, Hector Delivers

Wally had a narrower recollection of his first trip to the Stadium, which came when he was 9 or 10. The Yankees won the game on a walk-off basehit by Hector Lopez, and what made it even more special than a Mantle home run for a kid growing up in that era was that his mother had announced at the start of the inning that they were going home after the Yankees batted even if the game was still tied. Any force powerful enough to overcome edicts from Mom that ready or not, fun time was over couldn't help but inspire awe, and Wally's been hooked ever since.

Proof of that was sitting right between us in the person of Billy the Lawyer, who had attended this year's All-Star Game at The Stadium with Wally. After the 12th inning, when the American League blew a chance to end the game when the home-plate umpire called out a runner who had actually touched the plate before the tag was applied, Billy declared he had to leave because of the inconvenient fact that he had work the next day. Wally, having yet to re-enter that world since his retirement nearly three years ago, was not hamstrung by such concerns, but Billy also selfishly decided he was taking his car with him.

This meant that Wally was at the mercy of the Long Island Rail Road's schedule, and as he noted when he called me at about 12:45 a.m., there would be a train out of Penn Station at 2:09. As Wally explained it, this left him rooting for the game to end at 1:30 — soon enough to make the train, late enough that he wouldn't be waiting long for it to depart.

Too Close for Comfort

As a more-frequent user of mass transit than Wally, I felt compelled to ask whether, with all due respect, he was off his rocker in relying upon making good connections downtown on the subway. I told him he should be hoping the game ended by 1:10, or 1:20 at the latest, to give him enough cushion to get to Penn Station if the D train got slowed by the large Stadium crowd that would force it to linger when discharging passengers all the way downtown.

When the game ran until 1:38, I assumed Wally missed the 2:09 and was going to have an interminable wait for the 3:06 train that would return him to the bosom of Nassau County. Imagine my shock when that afternoon he informed me that, with the help of a couple of people who had left prior to game's end and held the LIRR doors open, he had made it on time — if arriving home after 3 a.m. qualifies as on time for persons of our age.

The first order of business for the Yankee finale was to set up a pool among ourselves as to who would hit the final home run at The Stadium. Wally and Mark the CPA both picked Alex Rodriguez, cutting into their potential profits. Billy the Lawyer went with a less-obvious choice in Johnny Damon, while I, ever the contrarian (in Brooklyn, we pronounced that "oddball"), tapped Aubrey Huff, the Orioles' designated hitter.

Neither A-Rod nor Mr. Huff got within smelling distance of the outfield walls, but Mr. Damon hit a three-run homer in the third inning, giving Billy the Lawyer bragging rights until the following inning, when Yankee catcher Jose Molina became the particularly unlikely answer to a trivia question by slamming a two-run homer over the fence in left-center field.

A Defenseless Pitcher

That allowed the Yankees to take the lead for good, overcoming some less-than stellar defense by their starting pitcher, Andy Pettitte. In the third inning, he had fumbled a dribbler hit in front of the plate by old Yankee nemesis Brian Roberts and then, apparently forgetting he has one of the great pick-off moves of all time, permitted him to steal second, which allowed him to score on a single by Melvin Mora. The following inning, Mr. Pettitte had similar problems with a grounder by Jay Payton that prolonged the Orioles' turn at bat long enough for them to take a brief lead on a two-out single by Mr. Roberts.

And so, when Mr. Pettitte took the mound for the top of the fifth with a new lead courtesy of Mr. Molina, Wally immediately speculated on whether Joe Girardi would allow him to stay in long enough to qualify for a win if he got into any trouble.

"He hasn't pitched that bad," I replied. "His defense gave them two of the runs." "And we're supposed to excuse him for that?" Wally asked.

Mr. Pettitte made the debate academic by not allowing anyone to hit the ball to him, or to otherwise reach base in the inning, and as the Yankees slowly pulled away to a 7-3 win, Wally divided his time between two favorite obsessions: figuring out which players the team would discard during the off-season, and imitating Yankee radio announcer John Sterling ("As you well know, Suzyn, heh heh heh ...'').

The Same Old Song

By the time Mariano Rivera got the last three outs, Wally, Billy and I had moved down to the lower stands, the quicker to leave once the post-game ceremony was over. Derek Jeter offered a simple yet eloquent summation of what had made the place special, putting particular emphasis on the fans, and then the entire team took a victory lap around the ballpark. The public address system kept playing Sinatra singing "New York, New York," although his evocation of Ebbets Field, "There Used to Be a Ballpark Right Here", would have seemed a more apt choice. (Personally, I would have preferred Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," which opens and closes, "They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot," but that sentiment might have cut a bit too close for the Steinbrenners.)

Walking out of the ballpark was like declaring the season over, even though there was still a week of road games to play. For Wally, it amounted to early release: no need to endure the excruciating and the exhilarating as Met fans would have to do, trying to will their team to transcend its horrifying bullpen and at least make the playoffs, no matter what further disappointments might be lurking.

Next year our Sunday ticket plan would place us in seats not as good as those we'd had at The Stadium for the past 10 seasons, although they would also be cheaper. Opening Day for the first time wouldn't be part of the plan, which meant Wally was going to have to dip into the European Vacation Fund if he wanted to be able to someday tell his grandkids that he'd closed the old ballpark and opened the new one.

That was not on his mind, however, as he doubled back after picking up the car to get my father and me where we had stopped at East 151st St. and Gerard Ave. There was more traffic to deal with before we could get onto the Grand Concourse and wing our way toward the Major Deegan.

Wally As 'The Other Guy'

Up near the McDonald's where we were to make the turn, a bottleneck had been caused by limousines bunching up as they rounded the bend. A livery car in the right lane edged out to move in front of us, but Wally, as if oblivious, kept inching forward.

"Watch out for that guy," I said. He responded by moving the car forward decisively, forcing the livery back. "That guy has to watch out for me," Wally said.

A bit further up, we seemed stymied by the limos when suddenly Wally darted to the left. It seemed like such a smart, obvious move until the approach of oncoming traffic led us to realize that Wally was on the wrong side of the street. But when he gunned the RAV 4, those cars stayed where they were as he came far out enough to clear the limos and make the widest possible right-hand turn into the left lane of the Grand Concourse.

"He's been doing this so long he's started to think he's a good driver," Billy said to my dad.

Many Stops, One Citation

In his defense, Wally noted that he had only been ticketed for one moving violation in his life, quickly adding that he had been pulled over between 20 and 25 times, where display of his badge generally resulted in professional courtesy from the cops. As some in the uniformed forces like to say, membership has its privileges.

We sped off into the night, not bothering to put on the radio to hear John and Suzyn do the post-game show. It was time to turn the page: an era was over, a national monument would go out of business at the height of its profitability because it wasn't quite profitable enough. But we would be back again next year, for the anticipation and the excitement and the groaning and the laughs, more than a few of which came over the phone or in the car rather than inside the ballpark.

Derek Jeter had it right: Yankee Stadium was rich with tradition and history, but it was the passion of the fans that sustained it. What was most remarkable was that he had grasped that without ever riding with Wally.