Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:
The recent telecast of the last baseball game to be played in Yankee Stadium was more than a regular-season game between the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles. It was part Broadway theater, part media circus, part pop culture, part sports memorabilia, but it was all good.
I am not a Yankees fan (color me Cincinnati Reds). The final game from the house that Ruth built was something special. For those of us over 60, the telecast was a photo album of our lives. Do you remember where you were when Don Larson pitched a perfect game in the 1956 World Series on Oct. 4?
Only during the World Series was a radio allowed in the study hall of the Paris Crossing High School in southern Indiana. I was a sophomore in that rural school of 120 students. Even non-baseball fans knew they had heard Mel Allen, the Yankee announcer, describe something very special that was not likely to be duplicated anytime soon. And it hasn’t.
In the mid-1950s, television was still out of reach of most families. Life and the World Series were regularly celebrated in the autumn of each year. It was about baseball. It was about America. It was about the attention of young and old being focused upon the outcome of men playing a little boy’s game.
The World Series somehow meant life was about something even bigger. For a couple of weeks, homework assignments, farm chores and daily school work seemed easier, and not the center of a teenager’s universe.
It’s ironic the Yankees, a regular October post-season fixture, will be absent from the playoffs and World Series this year. Last Sunday night’s telecast was worth more than any championship ring. It was sheer magic to watch the great moments and players of the past in that venerated sports venue march by. Who will ever forget Derek Jeter’s unscripted, impassioned, eye-watering speech at the end of the game talking about the history of Yankee Stadium and thanking the Yankee fans? With no television commentary, the current Yankees circled the field, waving and tipping their hats. Fans were holding or waving U.S. flags, standing and cheering, and the unforgettable voice of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” playing in the background.
For a few short, never-to-be-forgotten hours, I was 15 again and all was right in America.
Glenn Peck
Shawnee