I’ve been watching baseball in the Bronx for five decades and the old stadium still turns me on every time I step out of its tunnels and gaze down at its gorgeous expanse of perfectly asymmetrical green pasture. And so it was again last Sunday when my son and I took in a 2-1 victory over the Oakland A’s.
When it comes to baseball, I am a true believer; the “back-and-forth” games (basketball, soccer, hockey) leave me cold. Give me the exquisite ebb and flow of baseball, the game of inches. Like snowflakes, no two games are the same and you can bet you will see something new every time you go to the ballpark (whether it is in the Bronx or Newark or Trenton or Little Falls).
And so it was in the ninth inning on Sunday, when with one out and a doomed Oakland runner on first base, Oakland batsman Bobby Crosby sent a fly ball to right. An easy out in the making. The runner (a rookie star named Ryan Sweeney) was returning to first when the ball clanged off Bobby Abreu’s glove and fell to the grass in right field.
Abreu picked up the pesky little pill and launched it to second base in hopes of forcing the runner. Derek Jeter moved into position for the throw, but it sailed off the top of his glove and seemed headed for oblivion in leftfield. That’s when Alex Rodriguez stepped into the action, snatched the errant throw, and flipped to Jeter, who scrambled back to the base and just forced poor Sweeney.
Wow. Never mind that the runner was probably safe. This was a play that no one had ever seen before. The congregants at Yankee Stadium roared, the players giggled at their parlay of extraordinary skill and dumb luck, and poor Sweeney trudged off the field wondering why he got out of bed that day.
The big ball yard closes forever in September (okay, October if the Yankees make the playoffs). Other than the scheduled last game, tickets on Stub Hub are still reasonably priced. Don’t miss out. Something new happens at the old ballpark every day.