Listen to that organ. What's the tune? Who ever knows the actual name? But the organ, that organ is going, louder as you get nearer to the big gray beast. Smell that unmistakable smell. Hot dogs, beer and peanuts only smell one way combined-they smell like Yankee Stadium. The elevated number 4 train drowns out the organ and everyone on the bleachers line ready to fight for the best seat, or their seat. Across the street you can see shops, the bars, the sea of blue hats and jackets. Make a right turn around the gray walls and you'll see the sidewalk cafe, the alley, where black guys wave thick stacks of box-seat tickets in your face, telling you can shake Don Mattingly's hand in the on deck circle you'll be so close. Pass the old blue ticket booths that they used to use when you could walk right up to the stadium and buy a ticket like it was Disneyland, and you were paying for a day's entry. You go to the huge smoke stack bat, and it's near half-covered with cigar smoke from all of the old men sitting at it's base. You pass the box office and the lines are so long they block people from getting through. The people on the credit card return line look the happiest. You go to the first gate you see and hand your ticket to a man in a blue blazer and gray pants who looks to be happy that you came: "and you're wearing your Yankee's cap little boy, great sign!"
The building is as gray inside as it is on the outside, but now the smell is so strong that is has you in a daze. You walk those ramps and tunnels as if it is a maze that leads to bliss, to an understanding of something you love that lasts eternally inside you. And bliss it surely is when you find your gate and see that sky like an endless peak of a roller coaster, then you look down and see the most green sea of grass you've ever seen. As you go to your seat, you mumble to yourself, "if they hit the ball to me on that outfield, I'd field it! I'd field it like Jesse Barfield, and I dare that runner to try to go to second on my arm." Your seat is cramped, and in the middle of the row, but you wont move from your seat. You won't have to use the bathroom, you won't want to miss a second.
Listen to Bob Shepherd announcing the the names. The catcshuh, Ruck Ceroone. You mock the voice because it's so familiar, something that you think will never change. Just like the organ, the one playing the national anthem, Eddie Layton having his way with a church instrument, weaving it into baseball, making it the soundtrack to the Yankees. Look down from the cartoonish upper deck, sloping from the heavens with intrigued faces in blue caps eager to pass instant judgment, and you can see Dave Winfield, twirling a bat with a weight-doughnut on it and you lock the memory, that's how I'm going to warm up before I go to bat, I'm going to be a star. There's our mustachioed captain Mattingly making a clever first-to-third advance on a single, and someone says out loud, "see that, just like the captain, always hustling," and gives his fatter buddy a huge high-five. That's how I'm going to run when I get on base.
A portly man yells from above you "peeeanuts hayaa, getcha PEA-nuts!" and a man yells "hey peanut man!" and before you can say 'projectile' a bag of peanuts whizzes past your eyes and hits him in the chest. They meet later to complete the transaction. The crowd cheers, and the ground under you shakes like an earthquake of good feelings. You almost want to laugh at that shaking because you're certain that this place will never be gone, this place will never crumble, this place will never be a six-hundred foot spread of ruins. This place is special and not like those places you see blown up, being sucked down into their own ugliness as if the earth underneath had grown tired of it and flushed it. The lights are brighter here and the game looks so much more pure and smooth. It's a spot far too perfect to destroy, so sitting there letting the place overwhelm you, you never had to take the time to imagine it disappearing because when you left you were still there. At home, in the mirror, you were Rickey Henderson, or Roberto Kelly or Jack Clark, and when you were hitting that home run that won game seven of the fictional World Series in your head, the one that only has a game seven and a bottom-of-the-ninth inning, you were in Yankee Stadium, taking in the showering rain of cheers splashing down from the decks like adults said Reggie and Mickey did.
That sad feeling you have when the game is over is that feeling of leaving a good dream to go to school. The feeling of being forced to move on, forced to understand that there will be tomorrow's and next year's and new places to go. That feeling of being forced to take the medicine without the 'spoonful of sugar.' All of the adults around you can handle it being over just fine, but you, you'd stay if you could. You'd get full on peanuts and hot dogs and watch that Diamond-Vision screen until it turned off for the night. Fall asleep in a box-seat and have wild dreams about men in top-hats cheering swift-swinging Yankees in baggy pinstriped uniforms. Next to you, a man may light a pipe. The field is just as green, and the chatter is just as loud. The smell is at it's strongest, and now you know why that smell has always felt regal to you, it's because it's the smell of baseball in it's most artistic, pure and admirable form. It's the smell of baseball painted on baseball's most perfect canvas, Yankee Stadium.
