The Healing Journey

March 26, 2026

The Baseball Cathedral

By Brian D. Wallace

I thought of my father when I walked into the new Yankee Stadium a few years back on a Saturday morning that the weatherman said would bring rain, but unexpectedly delivered a strong sun over the spanking new field.

How many men think of their fathers when walking into a ballpark? I would guess that a good share of the 46,000 men and women who attended that day may have had a fleeting thought of Dad—particularly if he was no longer with them.

I wondered what he might think of all the hoopla and the much ballyhooed new stadium. As a boy, he watched Ruth and Gehrig at the end of their careers and made at least one summer trek to the stadium each year to root for teams led by DiMaggio, Mantle, Mattingly and Jeter.

In 1996, when the Yankees ended an 18 year dry spell with a remarkable World Series win over Atlanta, he and I were in the stands for the final game when Wade Boggs did his victory lap around the warning track on back of a policeman’s horse, and the full moon over the stadium radiated a peacefulness across the entire restless and spent city. I can still see the look of happiness on my father’s face. Later, I remember reading that nary a crime was committed in Gotham in the first days following the victory.

My last visit to the old stadium was on April 20, 2008, when Pope Benedict made the slow drive in from left field (with Bishops and Cardinals seated in the dugouts) to thunderous applause on a rainy, bone chilling Sunday morning. The old place rocked as though Mickey had hit a tape measure job to win a big game, but the Pope was fishing for souls, not insurance runs.

My father’s dedication to the Yankees and commitment to the Church were the twin pillars of his life outside of his love for my mother and the family. In fact, it was difficult to figure out where one left off and the other began. He never missed Sunday Mass and quite often walked to morning Mass during the week. The rest of the day during baseball season, he worked in the yard with an ear phone in, or had a portable radio nearby, and it seemed the game was always on — the roar of the crowd like static over the tiny speakers.

So, after he died, when I walked into the new ballpark with a close friend, I had some personal history, if not, baggage, with the old place: the painted girders, the sticky concrete floors, the narrow ramps leading to the shock of the green field in the middle of a grimy neighborhood, the boring minutiae of the innings, the sudden explosion of energy when something unusual happened, and of course, all the great Yankee history and lore that made it a baseball “cathedral.”

All of which made my first steps into the new stadium feel somewhat strange and almost disorienting. On first glance, it was so close to the old that to borrow a phrase from Yogi, it gave me a sense of “de ja vu all over again.” There was an Alice in Wonderland feeling of almost knowing the place and yet everything is also different.

They built the new stadium about 300 yards from the old, and sited it on the same axis in relation to the elevated trains and the tenements that line the hill of the old South Bronx neighborhood. But they tilted the field a few degrees, giving you the sensation that whoever moved it didn’t get it back to the right place.

“You think too much,” I heard my father say, when I found myself musing over the similarities and differences. A member of the “Greatest Generation,” he did not have the habit of analyzing his love for the Yankees, the aesthetics of their park, or his own faith. He accepted it all, played by the rules, and found freedom between the foul lines.

I can’t help but think of the “Great Hall,” the surprising colonnaded granite and limestone transitional space between the sidewalk and the inner sanctum of the stadium. A scoreboard blasts great Yankee moments captured over the years, some of them grainy and flickering with time, while the announcer offers play-by-play in near apocalyptic fervor. The huge, bigger-than-life banners of Yankee greats remind you that you’re in the presence of baseball gods as you move into the concourse and that first redeeming vision of the field.

How well we know that some of the gods have feet of clay! And anyone who knows baseball is fully aware that the game is full of slow and routine innings, alternating between boredom and a building tension ignited by a great play into a moment of pandemonium. In between the glory days, even the greatest whiff at the plate, boot and bobble the ball, let pop flies drop in, get thrown out at home, miss a sign and get caught looking.

As much as my father loved baseball, he knew when things really get tough, the only thing that matters is what’s inside you. And we knew he was preparing to leave us a couple of weeks before he died, when he turned off the radio and the Yankees for good. I suspect many of the Yankee greats learned their own lessons when the cheering stopped. But now the weather is warm and the boys of summer are back, playing ball in the Bronx —and there’s no better place to celebrate fathers and sons. Thanks, Dad. Play ball!
(Writer Brian D. Wallace is former editor of Fairfield County Catholic.)

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