HOUSE OF THE HOLY
WE REALLY should start with the nickname.
Anything this good, this grand, this grandiose, deserves an unforgettable nickname, whether you are talking about a President (“Father of His Country,” “Honest Abe”), or a performer (“The Chairman of the Board,” “The King”), a ballplayer (“The Yankee Clipper,” “The Splendid Splinter”), or a ballpark.
And so we have “The House That Ruth Built.”
We also have “The Stadium,” sure, which is in its own way a fitting tribute, because despite the fact that many buildings have been constructed since 1923 that have had “Stadium” as a surname (“Shea,” and “Three Rivers,” and “Riverfront,” and “Veterans,” and we could go on forever), there is only one place to which you refer if you speak of “The Stadium” whether you are in SoHo or South Dakota, Tribeca or Tuscaloosa, Arthur Avenue or Abilene, Texas.
“There’s only one Stadium,” Reggie Jackson said a few years ago.
And there is truly only one “House That Ruth Built,” named for the man who was the towering figure of his time in baseball, who still cuts a mythic, mystic swath through everything the Yankees do. Babe Ruth hit a home run to christen Yankee Stadium, naturally, because there has never been an athlete who so routinely rose to the occasion as Ruth did.
Interestingly, the day before Yankee Stadium officially opened for business on April 18, 1923, these were Ruth’s first recorded words describing his new home: “It looks pretty far out there to that right field fence,” he said, but that was only true if you compared Yankee Stadium’s 296-foot distance to the one he’d taken aim at the previous three years at the Polo Grounds, where Ruth’s target sat a mere 258 feet away.
Still, after launching four balls into those “distant” seats, Ruth declared himself satisfied with the new facility, and it was the next day, when he saw the thick crowds gathered at noontime for the 3:30 start, that he confided in a couple of members of the press: “I would give a year off my life to hit a home run today.”
So it was that in the bottom of the third inning, with a run already in and runners on the corners, Ruth stepped up to the plate to face Red Sox pitcher Howard Ehmke. He worked the count to 2 and 2 and then, submitting to the standard scouting report of the day, one the Giants had exploited to perfection in the 1922 World Series, Ehmke opted for a big, slow, sweeping curveball to try to fool Ruth.
In the stands were 74,200 people, nearly 30,000 more than what had stood for 6½ years as the largest gathering ever to watch a baseball game. That time had been a World Series game, Oct. 9, 1916, when 47,373 people had flooded Braves Field (offered up as a temporary residence for the Red Sox) to watch a certain Boston pitcher named George Herman Ruth twirl a 14-inning complete game to defeat the Brooklyn Robins in Game 2 of the Series.
In coming years, there would be hundreds of thousands of people who would swear they bore witness to what happened next, to the high, towering drive that resulted when Ruth’s 40-ounce, 36-inch behemoth of a bat collided with Ehmke’s slowball. Sixty-one years later, that Louisville Slugger 125 model bat would be sold for the staggering sum of $1.265 million; for the moment, Ruth haphazardly discarded it as he watched his blast sail over the fence, well within the foul pole, landing 10 rows behind the bleacher railing.
“You did it, you big SOB,” Joe Dugan, the runner on third, yelled at Ruth as the big man crossed the plate, doffing his cap to the tittering throng.
That one swing of the bat changed everything. A popular nursery rhyme of the day was titled, “The House That Jack Built,” which reads, in part:
This is the farmer sowing his corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Fred Lieb, a 35-year-old sports scribe (after whom Walter Brennan’s sportswriter character would later be based in “The Pride of the Yankees”), writing in the New York Evening Telegram, summoned that verse instantly. In the next day’s paper, for the first time, “The House That Ruth Built” appeared in newsprint under his byline.
The newspaper would endure only eight more years; the nickname survives to this day, and now is certain to outlive the stadium itself.
It is not only a grand nickname, it is a proper and accurate one, too. For without Ruth, there would have been no need for Yankee Stadium. The Polo Grounds was a perfectly functionary ballpark for two teams to share, and the National League’s Giants were happy to present the Yankees with the opportunity to lease enough days to fill out a 77-date American League home schedule when they decided to abandon their wooden firetrap of a home, Hilltop Park, after the 1912 season.
But the tenants to whom the Giants extended this largesse were a laughingstock, a loser, and the No. 3 team in their own city behind the Giants and the NL Brooklyn club. The Giants never imagined the drawing power of Ruth, sold to the Yankees following the 1919 season.
And so it was that Yankees owner Col. Jacob Ruppert secured a 10-acre site across the Harlem River, well within view of the Polo Grounds, so it was that he contracted with Osborn Engineering (which had also built Fenway Park), so it was that after only 284 days of construction following the groundbreaking on May 5, 1922, the Yankees’ new ballpark – the first ever called a “stadium,” anywhere in the country – was ready and complete.
Eighty-six years later, Ruth remains a presence, a prominent one, a vibrant one, a ubiquitous one. Paul O’Neill would inherit right field in the 1993 season, making him a virtual descendant of the great man himself, and it continually and constantly humbled him, the acreage of land to which he would trot for the final nine years of his career.
“Babe Ruth worked there, man,” he said one autumn afternoon in 1996, during the Yankees’ first successful October push in 18 years. “I defy you, if you know anything about baseball, if you care anything about its history, to not be able to think about that every time you walk on that patch of grass. Babe Ruth worked there.”
So many others did too, of course, so many names that need only one name for instant, perpetual identification: Mickey and Joe, Whitey and Yogi, Derek and Alex, Thurman and Reggie, Moose and Scooter and Billy and Ellie, Casey and Donnie and Bernie and Mariano. And it is a testament to the man, and to the building, that all of them – no matter how many rings they won, no matter how many home runs they hit, no matter how many gaudy numbers they piled up – all of them take a back seat to one man.
To the Babe. The Bambino. The Sultan of Swat. The King of Clout. The Circuit Smasher.
Great nicknames, befitting a great man.
And a grand stadium.
