Diamond Memories

What makes any ballpark unique, whether a playground, your local diamond, or a major league park. Is it the sight lines, the smells, or the history of it's home side.

Usually it's a little of all that, but mostly it's memories, what you remember about the first time you stepped on the field to play, or sat down to watch.

The newer parks all seem to look the same, or have very similar features, they are not Wrigley, they are not Fenway, nor the House that Ruth Built. Some don't play on grass, some have concrete pillars, exploding scoreboards, dome roofs, brick walls or fountains in centre field.

The historian in me wants the older parks preserved, because when they tear down the old Yankee Stadium, when they demolished the old Tiger Stadium, the Astrodome, a little bit of history is somehow lost.






















Here is the beginnings of the demolition of the park at the corner of Michigan and Trumbell
streets in Detroit. At the end it was a rickety old barn, falling apart, and as they begin to tear in down to make way for Comerica Park, the ghosts were asked to vacate the premises.
Al Kaline , Ty Cobb, Mickey Lolich, and Hank Greenberg all called this place home, and Ernie Harwell called the last innings.










Yankee Stadium will come down, and you know anything not nailed down will be auctioned off, but it won't be the same. The New Yankee Stadium was built to replicate the old place, and sits beside the the Hudson River scowling down at the former park looking pristine, polished and very much the new age. Oh the monuments will be there, so will the pennants, but when asked what he thought of the new Yankee Stadium, Adam Lind of the Toronto Blue Jays remarked that it was a very nice place to play, but he remarked that when he stood in the batters box, he knew Babe Ruth had never been there.
Joe DiMaggio never kept his 56 game hitting streak alive here, and Ted Williams never patrolled the same patch of grass.













So what makes some places unique, it's a combination of things I suppose but it is certainly made up of memories, and the older parks just have more of them.
Even the old Ex hosted the first Jays game in 1977, and their first pennant. The Ex had their seagulls, the Cubbies have their beloved ivy and Fenway has the Monster. Whatever your favorite park is, it likely has something memorable.