Thursday, October 16, 2008

Remembering Yankee Stadium: The Seventies

(For your reading pleasure adapted from REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM: AN ORAL AND NARRATIVE HISTORY OF THE HOUSE THAT RUTH BUILT, on sale everywhere, buy it now)

ROLLIE FINGERS: The Stadium bullpen was a good place to watch a ball game from. Sitting on the bench, you would pop your feet up on the fence. If you were hungry you could always give a kid a baseball and he would go and get you a hot dog.

RON SWOBODA: All kinds of things went on in the bullpens. Sometimes we would send out the back door for pizza. There were rumors that some young ladies would occasionally slip in through the back door. I was never involved in any of that, but it was entirely possible.

BILL LEE: The guys who worked at the Stadium, the ones who groomed the area, the ushers, they were the ones to be friendly with. That was how you got your food. You tipped them well and they would bring a pizza, anything.

RON SWOBODA: The folks who used to sit in the bleachers were interesting. You saw the same people every day. They were mostly guys, a bit older, all huge fans. You kind of wondered what they did. You could stand up next to the fence there in right field and just talk to them.

BILL LEE: Moe Drabowsky, who played for Baltimore, as the story goes, would get into the Stadium switchboard. Moe called the Queen of England one time. He called China one time. He called the Vatican.

The 1972 season ended with the Yankees at 79-76 in fourth place in the American League East. Their attendance was a puny 966,328, the only time that decade of the 70s that the Yankees would have a season’s attendance below a million at home.

However, they contended until the middle of September thanks to the superb relief pitching of Lyle and the solid hitting of Bobby Murcer.

TONY FERRARO: Bobby Murcer used to sit in his chair and rock all the time. A friend of mine was in the furniture business. I asked him "Can you send me rocking chair? "
He said "Yeah, where do you want me to send it?"
"Send it to Yankee Stadium."


He sends the rocking chair, and we put it in front of Murcer's locker. "I'm getting tired of seeing you rocking in the chair," I told him. "You need a regular rocking chair." Then one day someone sawed the rockers off it. Who do you think that was? Sparky Lyle. He was a great guy for doing pranks. But Murcer had it fixed and before long, he was rocking again. When he was traded to San Francisco in 1975, he took the rocking chair with him.

On January 3, 1973, a group led by George Steinbrenner III purchased the Yankees from CBS for an estimated ten million dollars, a price called an "astonishing bargain" by some since the City of New York paid more than $1 million for a parking lot as part of the package.

Opening Day of the first year of Steinbrenner’s principal ownership and the last season of the old Yankee Stadium, the Yankees became one of the last Major League clubs to convert to non-flannel uniforms made of polyester. . . .

Harvey Frommer is his 33rd consecutive year of writing sports books. The author of 40 of them including the classics: "New York City Baseball,1947-1957" and "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball," his REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM, an oral/narrative history (Abrams, Stewart, Tabori and Chang) was published September 1, 2008 as well as a reprint version of his "Shoeless Joe and Ragtime Baseball.". Frommer sports books are available direct from the author - discounted and autographed. FROMMER SPORTSNET (syndicated) reaches a readership in excess of one million and appears on Internet search engines for extended periods of time.
Harvey Frommer "Dartmouth's own Mr. Baseball" Dartmouth Alumni Magazine//
REMEMBERING YANKEE STADIUM (Definitive Book)
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