Sports Column: Hate of Yankees balanced by love of tradition

Last week's column was the first part of a two-parter dealing with two of life's strongest emotions, hate and love, applied to baseball's New York Yankees. Part I outlined hate while this week's closer deals with love. Not love of the New York Yankees, mind you, but a love for what they had.

The afternoon I did the Kansas City Royals pre-game show at Yankee Stadium a number of years ago, I stood along the rail of the second tier and looked across the Harlem River and all those apartment buildings fronting Coogan's Bluff. Broadcaster Denny Matthews asked me what I was doing and I told him it was an attempt to imagine what it looked like when the Polo Grounds across the Harlem River seemed almost close enough to touch from Yankee Stadium. Matthews smiled and nodded. He had done the same thing years earlier.

Matthews was lucky in that when the Royals opened shop in 1969, he was able to visit Yankee Stadium in its original form before it was remodeled. I hated the Yankees but loved their tradition and history.

And I've had some pretty good friends who were Yankees. Phil Rizzuto, who died recently, was one of the nicest persons I've ever met. I had good times with two other Yankees who have died in Billy Martin and Hank Bauer. And I've spent a great deal of time in the past with Tony Kubek. All of them had a certain bearing, a pride as it were, simply to have been Yankees, some when they won their five successive World Championships from 1949 to 1953.

I have to admit that my contact with Martin, Bauer and Kubek was instrumental in softening my feelings toward the team. All three of them had a certain bearing and all had this deeply ingrained pride for simply having been a Yankee.

I also recall the feeling I got after walking out the visitor's clubhouse door and down the ramp that leads to the playing field of Yankee Stadium. There was a ceratin aura, a captivating feeling that enveloped you as the emerald playing surface came into view. When you make that walk, you make it with the ghosts of the game's greats. And they're going to do away with all that? Tear down the House That Ruth Built? A sacrilege. It was bad enough when they remodeled it. Soon, in 2009, Yankee Stadium will fade into history.

At one point I started walking toward the Yankee dugout where Martin, the the Yankee manager, was sitting. He saw me, and patted the seat beside him. I sat down and took it all in about an hour before game time. "Do you feel it?" he asked me, knowing full well I was a country boy who hung around Royals Stadium most of the time. How could you not?

Martin nodded in the direction of left-center where they constructed what looks like a little park to house the monuments that either used to be in dead-center field of the playing area or have come along later. "That's what it's all about," he said.

What Martin said was true. Like the Yankees or not, you can't help but get a feeling of what it has been like to set foot on that field over the last 85 or so years.

In another couple of seasons, like Martin, this Yankee Stadium will be no more. They already changed the House That Ruth Built once, but it was the same house, nonetheless. They say the new stadium will look much like the old one. It might look the same, but the ghosts of Yankees past I mentioned earlier will no longer roam the grounds.

As much time as I've spent hating the Yankees, I've spent a great deal of time admiring their ability to judge talent in the days before free agency made it possible to just go out and buy whatever they wanted. The Yankees, you remember, made trades to acquire many of their integral players. Others were home grown products. And yeah, they bought a few.

When one part (Bauer) got rusty, they went out and acquired a new part (Roger Maris). People like Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio, etc., came up with the Yankees. That's to say nothing of Casey Stengel and George Weiss, the field manager and general manager who made the team great, but committed the same mistake as Yankee Stadium. They got old.