Everything Changes

Yesterday, the MLB Network debuted by showing Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956, in its entirety, and a nostalgic conversation followed amongst many Yankee fans:

The players look almost normal-sized!
Look at how light the bats look!
The mound was so much shorter!
Yankee Stadium looked so different!
The racist comments!

To me, a medievalist, fifty years is nothing. Fifty years ago is current events when I'm used to reading and writing about events seven hundred years ago.

So it's a small miracle that a game with the history and impact in baseball could change so much in such a short time.

To many of us, fifty years seems like a long time--half a year, if you will.

So it should be no surprise that the game changed, and the only question should be one of degree--how much has the game changed?

On the flip side, though, it makes you wonder:

How much will the game change in the next fifty years?

Will we see women break the gender barrier on the field? Expansion to other states or perhaps another Canadian city? There will almost certainly be new scandals, new banned substances, but there will also be new records that seem unbeatable, new icons, new legends.

That's the thing about this game.

We're always looking towards the past--we have the luxury of doing that in our sport. Unlike football, which is relatively young, our championship game is almost 110 years old--there is no one alive today old enough to have remembered the very first World Series. (There's also probably few, if any, alive that remember the last time the Cubs won, but that's another story).

Sometimes, though, we get caught up in the past and forget about the future. It's changing now--with Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America, prospects names are becoming more familiar, and now even casual Yankee fans will know a little something about the Scranton or Trenton teams.

The game that we hold so dear will change between now and 2059. Maybe a little, maybe a lot.

There will be people that utterly despise the changes, like some still do the designated hitter, and others that welcome them and think they are completely necessary.

The constant, though, is that someone will still be here, watching it. Hopefully it'll be us, but the important thing isn't how the game grows, the important thing is that it will.

Yankee Stadium, Forever.

I didn't think I'd feel like this.

I didn't think that on a hot and heavy July afternoon I'd be two seconds from having to turn off the song I'm listening to because it's moving me that close to tears.

I didn't think that today I would find myself awash in the memories of this place again.

I thought that maybe, just maybe, I'd have some time left before I'd be thinking about this one more time.

I should have known better.

There's history here, and it's more than history.

Sure there are monuments out by center field, giving testament to some of the best to have ever put on pinstripes; guys that transcend the sport and instead are heroes not just of baseball, but of the best that Americana has to offer, but even so, the monuments can not touch our memories.

Our memory of this place is strengthened because we hold it together. Where one of us falters, another one can fill in the gap and together we share the collective conscience of a team and a city.

Who else can share the memories that we can share?

Pick your decade, pick your team, pick your memory. Whether it's Murderer's Row, Gehrig's Speech, Joe's streak, Yogi's quotes, Mickey and Roger's race for glory, Reggie's October or the way Tino and Scott helped a city heal in 2001, this place thrives on memory.

The ghosts are real. They are the memories that are so powerful they can will a team to its highest point.

There's still time left.

There's still time left to create more memories, to add more to the legend of this place--but it's fading fast. The nights are already starting to get longer, and the countdown to October has already begun.

After tonight, there is no more time to pause and reflect on what this place means to so many until October rears its haunting head, and though we want it, there is no guarantee we will be here then.

If there is any comfort, then, it's that while we might say farewell to the building, we will never have to say farewell to the memories.

We can destroy stone and mortar and metal friezes, we can rip apart the old seats and dismantle welded steel, but we cannot touch the memories.

We can take a bulldozer to the heart of Monument Park, but we cannot take a bulldozer to the memories.

The memories that give this place its life and its soul cannot be taken from us.

They are ours. Forever.


















Yankee Stadium
1923-2008