It was 90 minutes or so before the first pitch of what would become known as the Jeffrey Maier game of the ’96 playoffs when a commotion broke out aboard a very crowded D train en route to The Bronx.
Trouble?
Nothing of the sort.
It was Regis Philbin — informally auditioning some kids from LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts who’d recognized him and who, in the very best New York tradition, were seeking to extend their good fortune. After all, you can get famous here in strange and wonderful ways.
It was not to be this particular October afternoon (except for young Jeffrey, of course), but the show lasted all the way to 161st Street — and, in a New York sort of way, it was almost more fun than the game.
Yankee Stadium is like that.
It’s about big events, which can’t be ignored. But sometimes it’s about the small moments as well.
Nobody who was there will ever forget the October evening in 1977, when Reggie Jackson dispatched three consecutive first pitches to the nether regions — defeating the Dodgers and delivering a World Series championship to The Bronx after a painful 15-year drought.
This was a baseball event of the first magnitude, and a tonic to a proud city still reeling from near-bankruptcy.
A year later, as the Yankees closed in on the end of another improbable season, a little girl asked, quite tentatively, why she had never been to a baseball game.
It was a fair question.
And so on Sept. 17, her eighth birthday and two weeks or so before Bucky Dent’s home run would ruin the Red Sox, the little girl perched perilously on the edge of her sharp-angled upper-deck seat — and became a baseball fan.
She’ll be at Fenway Park this afternoon, a few stops down the T from home. She’s a young lady now, and she’s worrisomely close to becoming a Red Sox fan — but since it started at the Stadium, it’ll probably work out OK.
As it did for Mickey Mantle.
Mantle was about nothing if not big events at the Stadium. So it seemed natural enough to make the trip to The Bronx on Aug. 13, 1995 — to say goodbye.
It was a sunny Sunday; Mantle had died at 2:10 a.m., and by noon the memorabilia shops and street vendors had been stripped of everything bearing his famous number: 7.No shirts, no dolls, no machine-autographed photos — no tickets, actually; the scalpers were doing quite well for themselves.
But the memories were for free.
This day had been anticipated, and the scoreboard tribute was both dignified and moving.
Not included in the clips, of course, was a 1952 exhibition game between the Yanks and their then-Triple A farm club, the Binghamton Triplets.
Present that day had been a newspaperman and his son, the latter not quite tall enough to see Mantle jerk a ball so far out of Johnson Field that it landed on the roof of a house down the block (or so memory has it.)
Nevertheless, on that day another fan was born.
There were to be other games — especially at the old Stadium, with its infamously obstructed views — and much baseball discussion.
The newspaperman was an enthusiast, to put it mildly, but he sure didn’t root for the (damn) Yankees. And he was, for a National League fan, rather fond of the Red Sox.
So no doubt he would have encouraged the young lady’s apparent leanings in that direction — just as he would have appreciated the irony of so subversive an alliance having its roots in the upper deck at Yankee Stadium.
It turns out that the old newspaperman and the granddaughter he never really got to know have more in common than he might ever have suspected.
Blame it on Yankee Stadium.
And sometime this summer, take a kid to a ballgame. You never know where it will lead.
This article was originally published on April 10, 1998.