MAYBE it will feel this strange, this surreal on the inevitable day when they decide to move the President out of the old White House and into a new one, when the Pope switches his address to the new St. Peter’s Basilica, when they look for a Buckingham Palace with better sight lines and wider concourses and pricier luxury boxes.
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For now, the idea of a new Yankee Stadium will have to do.
For now, when each of the 4 million or so customers who will flow into the new ballpark takes the walk from parking lot or subway platform to turnstile, it is a guarantee — an absolute certainty — that every set of eyes will involuntarily wander across the street to where the old place lies in state, where it will stand for at least another few months as a living memorial, a breathing reminder of all that was, and all that’s been left behind.
“It doesn’t seem possible that we’re going to playing Yankee home games in an entirely different building,” Derek Jeter, who collected more hits than anyone in the old stadium, said earlier this spring. “I know how great the new place is going to be, and once everyone gets used to it it’ll feel like home but … there were an awful lot of memories in the old place for an awful lot of people.”
The new place will have the same address as the old place, it will have the same sun patterns and the same dimensions, and the players who call it home will continue to wear the ultra-familiar pinstripes and the even more familiar interlocking “NY” on their caps and their breasts, but both ballpark and roster will have changes, differences that can be as subtle or as glaring as you want them to be.
The ballpark will have a lot of familiar touches — the copper frieze is back, the gold-plated lettering out front is back, the bleachers and their attendant creatures are back. But there will be club seats and restaurants and the kind of available luxury that would’ve made even a blue blood like Jacob Ruppert blush.
So, too, will the team have an air of familiarity about it. Jeter is back, and so is Mariano Rivera. Andy Pettitte is back, even if that seemed like a dicey prospect through most of the winter. Jorge Posada’s shoulder has mended; he’s back. Alex Rodriguez and Joba Chamberlain, Robinson Cano and Hideki Matsui and Joe Girardi.
But there will be more than a dash of sumptuous luxury sprinkled into that mix, too: CC Sabathia at the front of the rotation, A.J. Burnett right behind him, Mark Teixeira anchoring the middle of the batting order. A new look for a new stadium, a dash of freshness to replace a mix that had grown a little stale and lacking.
Some would say there was no need for a billion-dollar ballpark to replace one with a trillion memories, the same way some might wonder if it was entirely necessary to bulldoze an 89-win team that stayed in the race despite losing its ace for half the season and its slugging catcher for just as long.
But, then, these are the Yankees we are talking about, and in the minds of the Yankees, as well as in their mission statement, there is no talk of being “virtually” first class. And so there is a new ballpark, and so there is a new roster, and so there will be as many expectations placed on this new team — and this new piece of real estate — as there’s ever before been anywhere in baseball.
That’s what happens when you elevate expectations. And that’s what happens when you leave a landmark standing, keep it within easy sight, keep it accessible, keep it lording over the new. When those 4 million people walk into new Yankee Stadium, they will get still get a full view of the old; what the Yankees have to hope is that when they leave, those 4 million folks won’t go home pining for what used to be.
The Yankees spent a mint to make sure that won’t happen. Now it’s time for the recipients of that largesse to make it so. Starting right now.