The platform of the northbound 161st IRT station provides an odd view these days, as the Yankees prepare to move into their spotless new stadium just a few feet from the tracks, with its gilt-lettered Decline-and-Fall sense of imperiousness, its arched retro façade vainly trying to evoke the grandeur of the original empire. But the sight of a new athletic palace in a time when excess signifies nothing but ugliness isn’t what’s so startling; that’s long been the Yankee way. No, it’s the sight of the old one, still standing, in the new one’s literal shadow, and well past its allotted time.
I knew that it hadn’t been razed, of course. I just wasn’t ready, as I stepped off the train for a late-afternoon sneak peek at the new one, for the old one’s striking sense of decay and almost-overnight obsolescence. Darkened, discarded, the building seems hunched, ashamed: a flaking relic that evokes visions of the municipal future of Alan Weisman’s World Without Us, when an indifferent nature will quickly reclaim all that we’ve built. Brushstrokes of rust stain the support beams on the back of the old center-field scoreboard. Down below, on the corner of 157th and River Avenue, rectangular cement boxes full of dead plants have been half-stripped of their brick facades. Beyond the old right-field bleachers, mud seeps up through the stones embedded in the plaza, seemingly ready to swamp the whole walkway. The blue awning above the ticket offices next to Gate 4 is torn, and ripples in the wind.
Yankee Stadium was hardly an architectural landmark, of course, once it been renovated in the mid-Seventies. The columns had been removed, the classic upper-deck façing had been incongruously slapped up on the signage beyond the outfield, and a phallic baseball-bat sculpture in front of the river entrance had risen like a piece of bad pop art. Design-wise, the “new” old stadium felt like a mutant. A classic ’57 Plymouth, say, with its fins and grill removed, trying to be a Toyota.
But the building deserves a better fate than this: to be held up as a shell of its former, glorious self, its decline visible and obvious for the fans about to file by the millions into the coliseum across the street. By now, the old place should long ago have been physically erased from this plane, and enjoying life in the Valhalla of dead stadia, with the disappeared motley-but-loveable Shea and storied Comiskey, alongside the shades of the multi-use monstrosities and the elegant old parks alike, all of them eternally trading happy tales of glory days gone by.
Instead, the old stadium still sits among us, as if in a coma, drained of a century’s worth of delirious energy, unable to rant against the injustice of having been abandoned for no good reason other than ego and dollars that no longer exist. As it beckoned my eye away from its Invasion-of-the-Body-snatchers pod-like doppelganger, the old place seemed to ask not for retribution, or even sympathy, but memories.
But the faces and names started to blur; rosters blended and mingled. In the last thirty years, the spasmodic fits of the owner have made virtually every season an unpredictable, insubstantial shifting of the sands. Reggie’s three home runs in one game of the 1978 Series stand out, of course, and Jeter’s tumble into the stands against the Red Sox a few years ago, and dozens of others feats of athletic and emotional glory. But those aren’t memories of a stadium. They’re memories of baseball players.
The building itself seemed to ask for an homage. And so, on that recent gray afternoon, I thanked the ballpark for the days when it stood tallest and proudest: the late Sixties, when there were so few of us nestled in its welcoming shell, and the columned stadium assured us that, despite the terrible baseball being played on the field, we were at home. When the DiNoto’s Bread sign stood out like a beacon of light, reassuring us few solitary thousand souls folded into the arms of its upper deck that we had a family.

Stand on the south end of the downtown side of the elevated platform now, and you can see white paint covering the top two stories on the back of 845 Gerard Avenue, a six-story, yellow-brick apartment building. For decades, beneath that paint, the back upper brick walls of 845 Gerard displayed a brightly painted legend: “Buy DiNoto’s Bread,” in yellow lettering atop of a field of red, green and white. The DiNoto’s sign didn’t glow or blink. I can’t imagine it sold the DiNotos much bread. I certainly don’t remember seeing any bakeries in the warren of bars and souvenir shops under the tracks.
But it wasn’t a commercial sign to me. It was a beacon of greeting that signified the compact between our odd band of faithful and the house where we’d assembled and the strange, exotic borough we’d assembled in. As I sat alone, up in that sunny or night-tinged stratosphere, a teenager in refuge from places where I’d never belonged — the Upper East Side, boarding schools – the panoramic view of the Bronx hypnotized me. And as the team struggled far beneath me, as Horace Clarke botched another grounder and Dooley Womack surrendered another long home run, the DiNoto’s sign spoke of — promised — a Shangri-la somewhere out beyond the park: a true neighborhood, where people did belong, had roots. Led real lives. Had real families.
Sometimes, in the middle of another 13-1 loss to the Orioles, I would wonder about the stories of the other solitary men and boys who sat up there with me. I would wonder what had drawn them here. Did they, too, feel as if they’d found a place they belonged? But I didn’t wonder too much. I was just glad to be there, in my house, where, win or loss, the DiNoto sign was always there, beckoning, assuring. I could almost smell the bread baking, wherever it was being baked, wherever it was being sold.
In later years, as a sportswriter, I went to hundreds of Yankee games. I cared about few. It was a job. I sat in the press box, and if the DiNoto’s sign was still there, I didn’t notice it. I was being paid to watch baseball, and when the game was over, to scurry down to the stadium’s basement to interview mercenaries. As a worker, I found myself as far from that upper deck as I could have possibly been.
When did the sign disappear? I can’t say for sure. All I remember is that one night a decade ago, I went to a game as a fan, with a friend, and sat in a lower-level box seat on a night when Darryl Strawberry hit a home run into a lightning-laced sky. That night, I noticed that the DiNoto’s sign had been painted over. The DiNotos were gone from my old house. That was the night when I knew that the relationship between me and my team, long eroding, had finally been severed.
Now I have my own house, and I have raised my own son, now in his twenties. I never took him to the stadium. I probably should have. But when he was growing up in the nineties, the stadium was not a home, just a ballpark full of false idols, packed to the rafters with screaming, beery strangers. Not family. I took him to football games. It was easier. Giant Stadium was never a house, just a stage. He’s a Giant fan now.
Perhaps, in some other dimension, in some other timeless time, in some other Valhalla, I will be privileged to break bread at the DiNoto family’s table. But on that gray afternoon, the colors of the vanished sign still glowed far more brightly than the gilded letters across the avenue, and more than brightly enough to welcome me home.

So here’s what’s overwhelmingly weird about writing today’s Parade Magazine cover story:
30 million people will read it, give or take 11 people or so. That’s the Rose Bowl, filled to capacity, times three hundred. What’s more overwhelming is the notion that 30 million people are reading about Jon Lester, who beat cancer to a) win a World Series; b) pitch a no-hitter; and c) now thinks there’s nothing special about any of it. And the idea that both Jon Lester and the 30 million people who will read about it consider themselves nothing but people — nothing more, nothing less — is a very humbling thought, indeed. Go, Jon Lester. Go, America.

So now that January is officially up and running and the planet continues to spin despite frayed nerves in every corner of the globe and any number of ways that it could grind to a halt in mid-orbit, February appears to be on schedule to succeed it, month-wise. This means that spring training beckons, which means that in a couple of months baseball will be played in two new stadiums (stadia?) in New York City.

Fine. Except that both of them are supposed to look old. Which I just don’t get. My hometown has squandered an amazing opportunity. It had a chance to make history. Instead, it looked back. And spent a couple of billion dollars to build a couple of retro ballparks — when it could have pushed the artistic envelope, and put a city which hasn’t built anything remotely gasp-makingly beautiful in seven or so decades back on the global architectural map.

Let’s forget about whether the two new ballparks needed to be built in the first place. (Okay, for the record: Yankee Stadium didn’t need to be replaced when it draws 4 million fans a year and the team can afford to buy every free agent on the globe; Shea was an obsolete shell. I’ll grant you that.) Let’s focus instead on what stadium architecture – what large-scale modern architecture of any kind — can mean to a city. Let’s talk about the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. The Sydney Opera House. The art museum in Bilbao.

Let’s talk about what the city could have gotten for its billions of bucks: at least one visionary, stunning, newsmaking, adventurous, mold-breaking stadium, designed by a cutting-edge architect. A stadium whose design provoked glee, wonder, debate, discussion. As any world-class city’s architecture should.

Now let’s talk about what the city got for its money: two incredibly expensive edifices designed to remind you of the hallowed past: An imitation of the old Yankee Stadium, which makes nominal sense, and an imitation of Ebbets Field, which – since the original Ebbets belonged to the Dodgers – makes no sense at all. (This isn’t even nostalgia. It’s ripped-off nostalgia!)

It’s bad enough that baseball is permanently wedded to its past, with its reverence for ossified statistics (“That ties him with Wee Willie Keeler for 47th on the all-time list for triples on a cloudy Tuesday!”) It’s much worse when that blind love of the good old days – which weren’t all that good — blinds it to progress.

A thought for sports freaks on this most optimistic of days: if you imbibed a tad too much Veuve Cliquot last evening – or 40-ounce Molsons, or Boone’s Farm cinnamon-apple, or antifreeze – but still feel the need in your fragile state to watch televised sports this afternoon, I hereby offer an antidote to endless bowl games featuring teams whose marching-band blaring brass sections (and endlessly hammering bass drums) (and eleven hundred commercials for pick-up trucks that get minus-seven miles to the gallon) may not strike the soothing tones you need right now.

So: a suggested alternative: Try watching the hockey game between the Blackhawks and the Red Wings in Chicago, on NBC. It’s going to be played outdoors, at one o’clock, on a rink laid onto Wrigley Field, backdropped by the majestic Second City skyline. It’s going to be cold. It’s going to be loud. Fighter jets will fly overhead during the singing of “O, Canada,” the best national anthem on the continent. It’s the NHL’s second annual Winter Classic, and other than the name – how can something be classic in its second year? — it’s the first really brilliant thing the NHL has done in decades. Maybe ever. A great sport spawned on frozen ponds in northern Saskatchewan has returned to its roots: to the frozen outdoors, where the ice surface will be imperfect – and the athletes, under national-TV surveillance, watched by a sold-put stadium, will be skating and hitting as if they were in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals.

Now, I’ll grant you this: hockey on television is difficult to watch if you haven’t spent much time watching the sport live, where you can be close enough to the rink to feel the boards shake, to hear the oomph of the body checks, to wince when someone’s stick slaps a puck at 1000 miles per hour (I exaggerate; it’s really 936 mph). On TV, if you don’t know where to look for the puck, the sport is virtually indecipherable. But in a strange way, judging from last year’s telecast, having the game in the wide, stadium outdoors actually makes it more intimate. If nothing else, it’s a way to avoid commercials: hockey is the only sport that refuses to insert TV timeouts. It deserves our support for that alone.

They played a football game fifty years ago today, on December 28, 1958: Colts-Giants, at Yankee Stadium, for the “championship of professional football.” It’s often referred to as The Greatest Game Ever Played. Maybe so, maybe not. But if you watch it now, I guarantee that something’s going to jump out at you: not a single player celebrated after they’d made a great play. This was because, as Frank Gifford put it on our book, The Glory Game, “Your teammates would have thought you were a jerk.”

Of course today, just about every football player celebrates on the field. Some pump their chests. Some perform painful-to-watch dances that they’ve obviously spent hours, if not, days, rehearsing in their heads. Some point to the sky, apparently to thank a deity. (Why anyone would think that a god has to reside somewhere “up,” in a universe that has no “up,” still eludes me. My own personal god, Bast the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, does not reside in the sky; she dozes eternally in a pool of sunlight on a very large bed in a very large cosmic bedroom.)

But here’s the thing: for every football players who does a dance after he makes a routine tackle, there are a million fans who bemoan this behavior, wishing for the good old days when men were men, all of them modest and humble and selfless, and they wore hats. I humbly submit: Get over it. Today’s NFL celebrants, like the non-celebrants of two generations ago, are just acting the way they think they’re supposed to.

Consider: Fifty years ago today, most of the players in that game earned about as much money as a teacher or a plumber (or less). Their salaries reflected their value to the culture at large: some guys drove trucks, and some guys played games. The games were on TV because they were more exciting than watching someone drive a truck. Nearly to a man, the players in the ’58 game did not think of themselves as special, and they behaved accordingly.

Today’s player happens to be plying his trade in a society that treats him as an entertainer and happily pays him like an entertainer, and has given him a stage so large, lights so bright, and a salary so absurd that strutting around the field is more or less a job requirement. His teammates expect him to strut. Think about it: if you were paid $12 million a year to teach a class, or assemble an engine, or take tolls on the Garden State, and you did so in front of 30 million people every day, wouldn’t you assume that we all wanted to be entertained by you? Why else would we be paying you 250 times what a teacher makes?

Parting thought: 153 years ago, when Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself was first published, the famous line “I celebrate myself” probably didn’t strike anyone as an expression of me-first selfishness. It was probably taken in the context I’d like to think the poet meant it to be taken in: “Life itself is pretty glorious, and I can’t believe that I exist – as me – on its stage. How cool! I’m me!” Walt seemed pretty exuberant, didn’t he? Then, I’m no Whitman scholar. But I like watching football, and I’m more than willing to allow the NFL’s athletes some ego-excess if they’ll keep playing the game I love to watch them play.