Book Alert / Yankee Stadium

Yankee Stadium -- The Official Retrospective by Mark Vancil and Alfred Santasiere III, Pocket Books '08 coffee table-format, $50, 232 pages, ISBN #1416547797. Scores of full-color and b&w glossy images sprinkled through text.

Don't ever argue to a diehard baseball fan that his stadium is just a concrete pit for playing the national pastime. Red Sox fans talk reverently, in hushed tones, of Fenway Park as "the Sistine Chapel of baseball." And for many decades, Yankee Stadium has been known as "the House That Ruth Built." No, not your Aunt Ruth, stupid -- Babe Ruth!

Against this backdrop, it's hardly surprising that the Yankee management went to considerable expense to jackhammer up the concrete visitor's dugout floor this spring to remove a Red Sox jersey that some construction worker had buried last summer as a joke during construction of the new Yankee Stadium, adjacent to the old one. No matter that a visitor from Mars would conclude from viewing this vignette that the human race must be seriously unbalanced.

The authors' timing for release of this handsome retrospective is impeccable, since the Steinbrenners turn out the lights this September or -- they hope -- October for the last time. The volume's quality makes it worthy to give for Father's Day not just to fans of the Bronx Bombers but to other baseball fans as well.

Vancil and Santasiere begin in 1923, when construction crews removed 45,000 cubic yards of dirt from an open field and used 2,300 tons of mechanical steel, 950,000 board feet of lumber, 800 tons of rebar and 116,000 square feet of sod to build the Yankee Stadium we know today. But most of the memories relate to the personalities that drew millions of fans to the ballpark -- Babe Ruth, to knock the cover off the ball and decades later to wave goodbye shortly before he died, Don Larsen to pitch the only perfect game ever in a World Series, and Lou Gehrig -- stricken by a disease that today bears his name -- to bid a tearful farewell after a stunning career.

But lest we forget, Yankee Stadium was more than an arena for baseball: "The most iconic moments in history have taken place within its walls....epic heavyweight fights, from Louis versus Schmeling to Ali versus Norton; the 1958 National Football League championship, christened the "Greatest Game Ever Played"; exciting college football games, including the one immortalized by Knute Rockne in which he asked Notre Dame to "win one for the Gipper"; and the unrivaled record-breaking successes of the New York Yankees, from the very first home run hit at the Stadium by Babe Ruth to Alex Rodriguez's 500th."