One thing you will rarely hear an old person say:
“Things are so much nicer now than they were when I was young.”
If you look at the picture above, you’ll see a place that was the closest thing to heaven for kids growing up in Brooklyn in the first half of the last century. Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the beloved Bums, through the end of the 1957 season. It was one of the smallest ballparks in the major leagues and had minimal amenities, and even if the Dodgers had remained in Brooklyn, there was going to be a new stadium soon.
I have been to many baseball stadiums over the last 65 years or so, the old ones in some cities and the new ones in others. But there are only two cities in which I’ve seen both. RFK Stadium wasn’t the original stadium in Washington, D.C., but I saw games there in my teens and then went to Nationals Park 40 years later.
Atlanta is even more odd. I have seen three baseball games in Atlanta, one in each of three different stadiums. I saw Steve Carlton shut out the Braves in the 1984 opener at Fulton County Stadium and I saw Stephen Strasburg in his rookie season in 2012 at Turner Field.
Then I saw Washington’s Max Scherzer face the Braves in 2018 at the new Truist Park.
I don’t have anything against older stadiums, although I have little use for the cookie-cutter parks of the early ’70s that were used both for football and baseball. Fulton County Stadium and RFK Stadium were among them.
My favorite sports stadium — and there are two I really love — is both old and new. Old in that it’s the third oldest of all baseball stadiums, and new that it was opened in 1962 during my lifetime as a fan.
Tommy Lasorda gave it the name Blue Heaven, but most people know it as Dodger Stadium. I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and in two of those years I saw maybe 150 games in the press box. In 2002 and 2003, I had the great thrill of being able to buy four tickets in the first row of field level for one game.
So I had the chance to take my kids to see ballgames from a view most kids never do.
I live on the opposite coast now, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be fortunate enough again to see a game at Dodger Stadium. I know my second favorite is out of the question, because it no longer exists. I’ll never see another NFL game at the original Mile High Stdium in Denver.
As for the truly old parks. I did see a game at Boston’s Fenway Park in 1997 and I saw a half dozen or so games at the original Yankee Stadium as a kid in the late ’50s and early ’60s. I never saw a ballgame at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but I saw the inside of the stadium in the winter of 1958-59 when we were in Chicago for a funeral.
I do feel some sadness for the people of Brooklyn, though. They not only lost their stadium, they lost their team and never got a replacement. The Mets are a New York team and never played in Brooklyn.
I find myself wondering if there was another city that lost a team in which it had as much invested emotionally.
The only one that comes close, to my mind, is the NFL Baltimore Colts.
But even Baltimore eventually got another team.
Brooklyn never did.