It took a while for the city and the Yankees to get together with this parade business, if you want to know the truth. Babe Ruth never got to see the Canyon of Heroes. Neither did Lou Gehrig, or Joe DiMaggio, or Lefty Grove. Phil Rizzuto had to wait until he’d taken residence in a broadcast booth to go. Casey Stengel had to wait until he was the manager of the expansion Mets to go.
Bobby Jones got two ticker-tape parades and Ben Hogan got one before anyone ever thought to invite the Yankees to the Canyon of Heroes. The first baseball man of any kind to be showered in confetti wasn’t even a New York baseball man, but Connie Mack, honored on Aug. 19, 1949, on his 50th anniversary as manager of the Philadelphia A’s, feted in the afternoon and bombed in the evening by the Yankees.
The city threw a parade for the New York Giants’ baseball team after it clinched the 1954 pennant but before it won the World Series. In fact, it wasn’t until April 10, 1961, that the Yankees finally made their way downtown . . . and that was to honor them for a World Series they’d lost the previous October.
Since then, of course, the Yankees have all but adopted Lower Manhattan as their second home, sort of a satellite office for the big room up in the Bronx, and when they climb onto their floats this morning at Broadway and Battery Place, and make their way to Chambers Street, it’ll mark the ninth time the Yankees have taken the trip, more than any other team, group or individual ever.
“It’s the greatest ride you can take,” said Derek Jeter, who will be taking his fifth such trip, which is as many as Admiral Byrd (three) and General Eisenhower (two) combined. “It’s you and your teammates sharing in a great victory. And it’s all of you and the fans, sharing one last moment together. I’m happy for a l l these guys who’ve never done this before. It’ll be the time of their lives.”
It will be. Someone asked Alex Rodriguez about the parade just as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, just as the reality of being a world champion had begun to sink in, begun to register, and Rodriguez could barely keep himself coherent he turned so instantly giddy.
“It’s going to be the best party of our lives,” A-Rod said.
It will be a hell of a party, that much is certain, and it will commemorate a different kind of Yankees championship team, one that, you can argue, we really haven’t seen in a couple of generations. It was unlike the Dynasty Boys of 1996-2000 because those teams were as beloved for their large home-grown core and for others — Tino Martinez, Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius, Chuck Knoblauch, even David Wells — acquired the old-fashioned way, through smart trading and savvy dealing.
It may resemble the 1977-78 Bronx Zoo battlers because there are so many fat contracts assembled in one relatively small room, but that is where even that resemblance ends, because these guys got along far better than those guys ever did. You were never going to catch Mark Teixeira saying that he was the straw that stirs the drink, hinting that CC Sabathia could only stir it bad. Not this bunch.
Really, in many ways, the era this team most resembles is the Old-Time Dynasty Yankees, the ones that inspired such devotion among their fans and such resentment everywhere else, teams built to batter you and to better you, teams that inspired so many fans in American League outposts like Detroit and Cleveland and Chic a g o t o wail, “Break up the Yankees!” You hear that a lot now, and those shouts are sure to get louder, and you know something? That’s OK. Let them all roar. Today, in the Canyon of Heroes, nobody will be able to hear anything other than a city and a baseball team thanking each other, loudly, for the ride of their lives. It’s a rite of autumn the Yankees know better than any who ever lived.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com